caliber
2 spring 2021 / calibermag.org PRESIDENT Lauren VanessaLeungWan* EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Lauren VanessaLeungWan* CHIEF PRINT EDITOR Marie Bellevue HEAD OF PHOTOGRAPHY Charlene Wang Henry DeMarco* HEAD OF DESIGN Lauren Leung HEAD OF MARKETING Emily SamanthaQue Miller* CHIEF WEB EDITOR Angelina Liang Evelyn Taylor* *Spring 2021 PRINT WRITERS Annabelle Long Rina JenniferReginaChaseGretaHafsahGarrettIsabelleKristenAvyssaRossiAboutorabiYeeZhouOmanAbbasiDieckMcClearyLimCo PHOTOGRAPHERS Henry DeMarco Emily SamAnnaKyleAnnaKatherineCharleneQueWangChenChangGarciaTakataChangQuinones DESIGNERS ILLUSTRATORS& Jadyn TimothyAvinaIanMaddieMakennaConnorLeeLinLeungYehTaiYadavYang STAFF
EDITOR’S NOTE
Lauren Leung Editor-in-Chief & President
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Iam so honored to introduce you all to Issue 21, concieved, written, and created in a year when for many, it seemed like our lives went from being on pause, to suddenly reawakening -- from a springtime of isolation to the fall of rebirth. In this issue, you will find the products of this precious and fleeting time -- reflections on the past, escapes to nature, hometowns, cinema. I am so happy to be able to share each of these pieces.
4 spring 2021 / calibermag.org Finding Space for Restorative Justice at UC Berkeley 4 Annabelle Long Fashion: The Least Fitting Industry 10 Rina Rossi Textures of Stinson 16 Katherine Chen Fall Gallery 20 Garrett Oman New York City 24 Anna Chang the dream of Minari 30 Reg Lim bifocals: Magical Oregon from Two Lenses 34 Henry DeMarco and Katherine Chen One Test, Two Test, I’m Stressed, You Stressed 42 Chase KilljoysMcClearyandSlow Jams: The Power of Bedouine 46 Samantha Miller Ode to Origin: Brisbane, California 52 Jennifer Co Table of Contents
5spring 2021 / calibermag.org nascence 58 Caliber photographers A Year of Car Trouble and Luck 64 Annabelle Long A Letter to my Younger Fruity Self 72 Avyssa Hyper-RealityAboutorabiand Compulsive Consumption 78 Greta Dieck The Ambition Spectrum 82 Kristen Yee Light and Projections 86 Caliber photographers How to Craft a Personality 92 Isabelle Zhou The Spectacle of Hope Within the Movie Musical 98 Hafsah Girlboss:AbbasiSuccessful Young woman or ‘sexist Trojan horse’? 104 Rina Rossi
Space for Restorative Justice at UC Berkeley
Finding
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Afew years ago, the Restorative Justice Center of UC Berkeley was living something of a realized dream. The Center, established by Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley a decade ago, had office space in the old Stiles Hall. There, they had access to mirrored dance studios where they could hold community circles (RJ lingo for guided conversations and reconciliations), an office space for Shackford-Bradley, and maybe most importantly, they had access to a community. They shared the space with the food pantry, the Cal Veterans Service Center, which provides resources to student veterans, and the Underground Scholars Program, which supports formerly incarcerated and systemimpacted students as they navigate Berkeley. The space was old and run-down—in an interview, Shackford-Bradley recalled a ceiling tile falling on her as she worked at her desk, as well as constantly leaking ceilings—but part of it was theirs, and for an organization that has long struggled to establish itself as a critical campus resource, that felt like a lot. This dream was short-lived. The old Stiles Hall, operated by a private nonprofit that has served under-represented students and community members since 1884, was demolished in 2016, only a year after the RJ Center moved in. It was replaced by a smaller, more modern space, andz Blackwell Hall, the swankiest of the student housing complexes. The new Stiles Hall is sleek, contemporary, and continues to be a hub for resources for under-served students, but when the remodel happened, the RJ Center lost the only physical space it has ever had. Other groups scattered: the Cal Veterans Service Center now operates out of Hearst Gym, the food pantry has space in the basement of the MLK Student Center, and the Berkeley Underground Scholars continue to operate out of the new Stiles Hall. But the RJ Center remainsTheunanchored.RJCenter was established in 2010 by Dr. Julie Shackford-Bradley, then a faculty member in the now-defunct Peace and Conflict Studies Department, and Jose Arias, then a graduate student in the School of Education. They shared a vision for a place where students, staff, and community members could turn to help repair harm. Together, they successfully applied for a grant, and in 2011, they hosted their first community trainings. When we spoke, Shackford-Bradley described the difficulty of quickly summarizing what RJ is and what it can do because it is and can be so many different things at once. The Center’s website offers a relatively simple description: “Restorative justice brings people together to build community and address harm through community-based circle processes. At the heart of RJ is the belief that strong communities are essential to preventing harm from occurring. When harm or conflict arises, a trauma-informed, circle practitioner engages participants in transformational processes that address the needs of all who are affected. These processes emphasize accountability, humanity and community.” Not exactly an easy elevator pitch, but at its core, RJ is about building stronger communities through addressing harm that occurs within them.
Once established, the RJ Center held workshops and trainings for various groups around campus. Arias and
WORDS BY ANNABELLE LONG VISUALS BY KYLE GARCIA TAKATA
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Shackford-Bradley shared the values and principles of RJ with community members, who they hoped would return to their corners of campus with a good understanding of the importance and utility of restorative practices. The trainings went well, but they found that restorative practices were harder to export than they had initially hoped. Students and staff returned to their communities, but still didn’t quite know how to build restorative justice into their existing systems. But the RJ Center remained as a resource, and now, members of the campus community knew to turn to it if needed. Given that restorative justice is a fairly large departure from Western models of justice and accountability, it isn’t too surprising that campus groups struggled to figure out how to fit it in. It was this difference that attracted Shackford-Bradley to restorative justice in the first place. Shackford-Bradley is a scholar of global studies, and in the 1990s, she became interested in international conflict mediation efforts. She watched closely as teams of researchers dispatched to North Uganda, Timor-Leste, and Rwanda to study conflict mediation and how communities addressed harm done. Western systems of justice told community leaders to prosecute those who had caused harm, to lock them away and purge their communities of wrongdoers. But oftentimes, communities did not want to adhere to such a model. It didn’t align with their history, or their values, or how they believed harm should be addressed. Instead, communities hoped to rehabilitate their neighbors who had caused them harm, to find ways for them to be members of the community again. The logistics of these reconciliation processes looked different across countries and in different communities, but the end result, in most cases, was the same: healed communities, where those who’d done harm and been harmed could co-exist relativelyShackford-Bradleyharmoniously. was inspired. These non-western models, in her eyes, had several things in common: they emphasized accountability on behalf of the person who caused harm, forgiveness on behalf of the people or communities who had been harmed, and usually, some form of restitution, often something as seemingly small as a pack of cigarettes or a case of beers. To her, “it felt right.” It aligned with her values, aligned with her worldview, and seemed to be a much more holistic and sustainable system than the hyper-punitive models of justice found in the US. She’d already gained some experience in community mediation efforts through Berkeley’s SEEDS Community Resolution Center, but she was hungry for more. Her initial intention was to go into international mediation—like the people she’d watched, studied, and learned so much from—but she soon realized that there was a much more immediate need. She’d spent much of her adult life in university settings, first at CSU Monterey Bay and then at UC Berkeley, and she’d never encountered a college with a robust restorative justice infrastructure. Establishing one at UC Berkeley became something of a calling. Around the same time as Shackford-Bradley worked to get the RJ Center off the ground, the President of the University of California, Mark Yudof, was exploring the implementation of restorative justice into student affairs across the UC system. He hoped RJ would provide an alternative way of addressing harms done that maybe didn’t rise to the level of a policy violation or legal infraction. It’s likely that he was motivated by an uptick in
student activism surrounding tuition hikes and the Occupy movement. It was the early 2010s, and RJ might have looked like an answer to student unrest. After his announcement, there appeared to be a window of opportunity for the development of restorative practices and restorative justice across the UC, but it didn’t last long. Beyond a few initial trainings sponsored by the UC Office of the President (UCOP), there wasn’t much behind President Yudof’s RJ ambitions. Schools didn’t receive funding or additional staff, and without dedicated professionals like ShackfordBradley, efforts at other campuses quickly fizzled out.
At UC Berkeley, however, the RJ Center was only just getting started. Shackford-Bradley created an advisory board with staff members from Residential Life, the Center for Student Conduct, and the Centers for Educational Justice & Community Engagement. She pushed for restorative practices to be implemented into the dorms, the conduct system, and the Tang Center, but nothing stuck. She returned to the drawing board, to the Center’s original mission: addressing so-called “climate harms,” or, in other words, damage done to the general social atmosphere of the university. She focused on developing ways to address racial and gender-based harms that perhaps wouldn’t constitute a formal policy violation and, in 2016, she created one of the enduring features of the Center, the RJ Student Leaders Program.
At any given time, the Center employs 4-12 undergraduate RJ Student Leaders, who are trained to provide their peers with the services of the RJ Center. Last year, the Center hired its first class of RJ Grad Student Leaders. The Center’s website proclaims that “RJ Student Leaders are busy!” and that certainly rings true. Student Leaders develop and run RJ-related events on campus, facilitate community-building and harm-response circles, write the Center’s newsletter and maintain its social media presence, and research and develop RJ-related policies for implementation around campus. Undergirding all of those efforts is a “different kind of leadership that emphasizes engaged listening, empathy, conflict resolution, [and] recognition of multiple truths,” according to the website. If Shackford-Bradley is the head of the RJ Center—and she is certainly much more than that—then the Student Leaders are its heart.
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That summer, Becca Lopez was hired as the new Director of the Center for Student Conduct after a hiring process that included input from both the RJ Student Leaders and caseworkers from SAO. Students sat in on interviews and listened closely to candidates’ answers to questions about their commitment to making the conduct process more restorative, and ultimately, Lopez, who had previously worked with students accused of misconduct in the Respondent Services Division of UC Berkeley’s Center for Support and Intervention, was hired. The first year of her tenure saw the beginnings of RJ Center-SAO-CSC collaborations that would ultimately lead the CSC to create more restorative options for students, and the first year of her tenure saw the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the 2018-2019 school year, the Student Leaders helped set in motion a project that has secured a more permanent place for restorative justice in the university conduct process. In partnership with caseworkers from the ASUC Student Advocate’s Office (which, full disclosure, I am a part of), the Student Leaders lobbied for the creation of a Restorative Justice Commission within the ASUC (Berkeley’s student government). The Commission interviewed students, staff, and faculty, and tried to figure out where and how it would be best to implement restorative practices and restorative justice into existing campus structures. Many of the caseworkers from SAO were members of the Conduct Division, which supports and advises students accused of violating the Code of Conduct (and which I am currently the Director of), and the Center for Student Conduct quickly became a potential partner.Caseworkers and RJ Student Leaders started to pick up where Shackford-Bradley had left off years prior, and they began to imagine a conduct process that left room for non-punitive pathways towards healing and accountability. What might UC Berkeley look like, they dared to ask, if not all harm was dealt with in the way western models of justice might suggest? How might our community change if those who caused harm could sit down with the people they harmed and understand the impacts of their actions on an interpersonal level? The answers to these questions were discussed at length in meetings of the Commission, and a collective vision of a more restorative conduct process emerged. The next step was getting the Center for Student Conduct (the CSC) on board.
The RJ Center has been busier than ever during the pandemic. In the summer and fall of 2020, as the nation collectively grappled with its history of systemic racism, many academic departments were urged by their students to consider their shortcomings on the matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Students asked their departments to do more for and be better to their students of color, and often, these conversations were facilitated by the RJ Center. Shackford-Bradley and RJ Student Leaders led circle after circle on healing racial harms within various academic departments and student organizations. According to Shackford-Bradley, this has represented the bulk of the RJ Center’s community-facing work in the last year. As the country and the Berkeley campus have struggled to weather the pandemic and its forced lessons in resiliency and reckoning with inequality, the RJ Center has been there every step of the way, teaching students, staff, and faculty the values of community, accountability, and being deliberate in their care of one another. The RJ Center is compensated for its efforts, but only indirectly—
Shackford-Bradley, Fils, and Wilgus met for hours every week for the duration of the 2020-2021 school year to share their hopes for the program and hash out disagreements about its mission and logistics. They learned from each other’s experiences and debated difficult questions. One such question: could suspension ever be restorative? Yes, the group concluded, if the student set concrete, achievable goals for how they’d use the suspension period to be a better community member upon their return. Shackford-Bradley spoke of their discussions fondly. As with any group effort, not everyone was entirely satisfied by every decision, but in the end, they settled on a proposal they felt proud of.
The next step: hiring someone to actually enact the proposal they’d designed. In the spring of 2021, candidates applied for the position of a Senior Conduct Coordinator/ Restorative Justice Practitioner within the CSC. Campus partners, including RJ Student Leaders and caseworkers from SAO, were invited to participate in the process, and Matt Nelson, a student affairs professional with restorative justice experience, was ultimately selected. Wilgus’s consulting contract expired over the summer, and Nelson’s started in May, and as of the time of this article, the CSC is waiting for revisions to the Code of Conduct to be signed off on before officially launching the REPAIR pilot program.Injust a little more than a decade, restorative practices and restorative justice at Berkeley have come so far. What began as an idea shared between a faculty member and a graduate student has blossomed into a vibrant center for the reimagining of justice and accountability, and now, a systemic change in the way conduct cases are handled. To be clear, not every case the CSC handles will go through the restorative pathway; most won’t. But that such a pathway exists is a testament to the RJ Center’s resilience and radical commitment to making UC Berkeley a better place, a testament to the importance and transformative potential of thinking about justice and accountability in new ways.Dr.Julie Shackford-Bradley is still dreaming big. The RJ Center was recently named a part of the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and she looks forward to a day when—like she originally dreamed—restorative practices and restorative justice are everywhere. She looks forward to a day when the RJ Center will once again have its own space, a warm, comforting environment where community members can gather and learn from each other. She looks forward to a day when students facing any number of issues will always have restorative options at their disposal. For now, though, she presses on, hosting Zoom circles and training the next generation of RJ Student Leaders, working tirelessly for a better UC Berkeley. And waiting for the day that the administration recognizes the critical importance of her work, not with a hyperlink in an email or a shoutout on Facebook, but with institutional backing and long-term support. Until that day, she’ll keep dreaming, but more than that, she’ll keep working, staying true to her commitment to making UC Berkeley a better place.
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departments receive funding from the university for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and some of them chose to allocate it to the RJ Center for the trainings and circles it provided them, but the RJ Center does not have a steady funding source from the university. It is currently on its second 5-year grant from the Wellness Fund, which Shackford-Bradley appreciates; she told me that even though the funding isn’t permanent, being able to plan ahead for at least four more years has been incredible for shaping a long-term, hopefully more permanent, vision of the Center and its role on campus.
After RJ Student Leaders and SAO caseworkers secured grant money for a restorative justice practitioner position within the CSC, groups from around campus gathered to interview candidates for the job of designing that new role. The pandemic initially brought the project to a frustrating and screeching halt, but as the campus and the CSC regained their bearings in a pandemic-stricken world, the CSC hired an outside consultant to design restorative pathways for the conduct system. Jay Wilgus, an attorney and seasoned restorative justice and alternative dispute resolution professional, was brought on to imagine a better, more restorative conduct process. Together with Shackford-Bradley and Ben Fils, a Senior Conduct Coordinator at the CSC, he worked to bring the CSC into a new era of restorative justice practice.
The past year has also seen major strides in the development of restorative pathways in the conduct process. The REPAIR project—which is not exactly an acronym but refers to the Restorative Educational Practices Initiative for Alternative Resolution within the CSC— kicked off in the spring of 2020, just as the pandemic did.
According to a Panoramas article entitled “Latinos struggling to find voice in fashion industry,” Rachel Rozak explains that Latina women make up only 20 percent of the female population, contributing to $3.3 billion revenue to the footwear industry annually and yet are still not considered as the “standard” face of a model. Latina women are clearly interested in fashion, yet lack a spot in high-end fashion representation. Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous models are deeply underrepresented in global “Fashion Weeks,” which are one of the most prominent fashion shows that take place seasonally in the fashion industry. For example, a mere 4.3 percent of the 2017 Business of Fashion 500 list, a of honorable prominent figures in fashion, were Latinos.
W
WORDS BY RINA ROSSI | VISUALS BY AVINA YADAV
FASHION: The Least Fitting Industry
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e can all probably name a few high profile models like Kate Moss and Gigi Hadid. Perhaps if we are Millennials, part of Generation X, or simply connoisseurs of 90s fashion models, Naomi Campbell, a prominent Black fashion model, may come to mind when thinking about fashion. But, none of these models are Latinx, Asian, or Indigenous. This is a display of the mere underrepresentation of Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous models in the fashionInindustry.a2019Business of Fashion article entitled “Between the Catwalk and the Consumer: Fashion’s Growing Diversity Gaps” Helena Pike reports demographics from a survey on ethnic diversity in the New York, Milan, Paris, and London Fashion Weeks. Of these 3,875 model bookings, 79.4 percent of models were white. Black models made up 10.4 percent of bookings, Asians and “other” (including Indigenous models) made up 6.5 percent of bookings, and Latinx models only made up a mere 1.6 percent of bookings. Models of color are already vastly underrepresented in fashion, but Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous models are the least represented, statistically, and in name. Fashion, which has historically been centered in the West, specifically in London, Milan, Paris, and New York, has also been described by Robin Givhan, fashion editor of The Washington Post as “not a particularly diverse industry,” and adds that “we are drawn to people who look like us...Unless they’re making a conscious decision to deviate from the standard, then the standard is what they go for. And [their] standard is blonde and blue eyed” (Business of Fashion, “Robin Givhan.”).
According to a 2017 Harper’s Bazaar article entitled “Victoria’s Secret is accused of racism yet again,” the show has also been accused of cultural appropriation, through its use of Native American headdresses incorporated into lingerie in a segment of the 2012 show ignorantly entitled “Nomadic Adventures,” an act of complete disrespect towards Indigenous communities. Additionally, Victoria’s Secret fashion models were even accused of racism such as using racial slurs backstage at the show. According to a 2017 BBC article entitled “Why Katy Perry and Gigi Hadid were missing from Shanghai’s Fashion Show in Shanghai after a video surfaced of Hadid imitating the Buddha. Furthermore, Karlie Kloss, a model and entrepreneur has
Although the Spring 2020 Fashion Week season was considered a “racially diverse” show by The Fashion Spot’s 2020 article entitled “Report: Racial Diversity Takes a Slight Step Backward, Size and Gender Inclusivity Plummet for Fashion Month Fall 2020” where feminist Morgan C. Shimminger explains that only 41.6 percent of models featured in the shows were models of color, still representing an unequal distribution of white models and models of color.
According to a 2019 Time article entitled “Victoria’s Secret Cancels Fashion Show as Sales Fall” Mahita Gajanan explicates that the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was cancelled due to low viewership in 2019. However, this fashion show was once one of the most popular and highly anticipated annual events in fashion to occur every November or December. Victoria’s Secret, a women’s lingerie and clothing retailer, has been on the decline for the past several years, as it has reportedly failed to stay relevant regarding fashion trends and beauty ideals, according to a 2018 Time article entitled “Victoria’s Secret has struggled to stay relevant.” Sales even declined by 7 percent during a 2019 sales quarter, in comparison to a 2 percent decline during the same period the year prior (CNBC, Setty). Interestingly, lingerie brands that embrace body inclusivity and positivity like Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty, as well as American Eagle’s lingerie line Aerie, have become increasingly popular (Time, Gajanan). Following this trend towards greater acceptance of body inclusivity, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show was often criticized for racism, sexism, body negativity, and encouraging unhealthy eating habits.
Specifically, Australian plus-size model Robyn Lawley called for a boycott of the fashion show, disapproving of the show’s lack of diversity. Barbara Palvin, a Hungarian Victoria’s Secret model, had been described as a “slightly more size inclusive model,” even though Palvin is a US Size 2, according to Shape article “Victoria’s Secret Added a Slightly More Size-Inclusive Angel to Their Roster.” CNN’s news anchor Anderson Cooper also criticized former Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima for her liquid-only diet, in preparation for the fashion show every year (Time, Gajanan). Ed Razek, former chief marketing officer of L Brands, the retail company of Victoria’s Secret, came under fire for saying that transgender models should not be cast in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, according to a 2018 Teen Vogue article “Fashion Insiders Slam Victoria’s Secret Executive Ed Razek for Transgender Model Comments.”
Victoria’s Secret,” critic Grace Tsoi explained that one model, Gigi Hadid, was even banned from attending the 2017 Victoria’s Secret
been criticized for racism on multiple occasions: for wearing a traditional Indigenous garment in a 2012 Victoria’s Secret fashion show, as well as for wearing Japanese geisha garb for a Vogue photoshoot. Despite receiving criticism for these controversial topics, Kloss and Hadid, both white models, are still highly successful in their respective careers. Hadid has graced more than 35 Vogue covers and returned to the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show following the racial controversy. Kloss has been regarded as one of the top 30 models of the 2000s, as well as has been heralded for starting Kode with Klossy, a summer camp promoting computer science and coding for young girls. Clearly, minority underrepresentation, racism, and xenophobia in the fashion industry go unnoticed and unpunished. According to a 2014 Thrillist study conducted to measure the racial diversity of the models since the Victoria Secret Fashion show’s inception in 1995, all 295 models who participated in the show from 1995-2014 came from just 53 countries. Of these 53 countries, most were from the United States. Only four Asian countries were represented, which included a total of six models collectively from India, China, South Korea, and Malaysia. Critic Jessica Andrews explains that in the 2015 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, of the 44 women to walk the runway in total, only two models were Asian, and no Asian model has ever been given the title of “Victoria’s Secret Angel” according to a Teen Vogue article entitled “Why We Deserve More Diversity on the Victoria’s Secret Runway.” While the obligations to be a Victoria’s Secret Angel, in comparison to a regular Victoria’s Secret runway model have not been disclosed, it has been implied by models and Victoria’s Secret executives that the role comes with greater responsibility, as well as more appearances on the runway and campaigns. In addition, white models are awarded the title of “Victoria’s Secret Angel” seemingly quickly, in comparison to models of color. Namely, Taylor Hill, a white model who first walked in the show in 2014, was given the title of one of the Victoria’s Secret Angels in 2015. In contrast, Liu Wen, a Chinese model who was one of Forbes’ highest paid models, participated in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion show in 2009-2012 and 2016-2018, but never became a Victoria’s Secret Angel. Models of color, like Asian models, must work much harder than white models for the same opportunities. While the fashion industry is yet to be considered diverse, representation of marginalized groups has been improving dramatically in the past couple of years, partly through the power of social media. Transgender, non-binary, plus-sized, people with disablities, persons of color, and older models are making more strides into the fashion industry. Chella Man, a transgender and deaf model and artist is signed with the prestigious IMG Model Agency. Man has also modeled and interviewed with Vogue and has a strong social media presence, their Instagram page garnering 467,000 followers. According to a 2020 The Fashion Spot article entitled “Report: Racial Diversity Takes a Slight Step Backward, Size and Gender Inclusivity Plummet for Fashion Month Fall 2020,” the number of models over 50 participating in Fashion Week increased from 39 to 44 from Spring 2020 to Fall 2020. While this may seem like a small jump, there have been some Fashion Week shows that have only featured 10 models over the age of 50. Black trans model Jari Jones donned the front campaign of Calvin Klein, a company that has long been perceived as only featuring white, cisgendered models. Furthermore, fashion agencies like Margaux the Agency have committed to a mission statement that reads, “We set our own standards, and we are not concerned about amounting up to the typical status quo,” and is evident by the fact that they sign many models of color and non-traditional models to their board. If such strides and measures are being made to increase diversity and inclusivity in the fashion industry, why aren’t more high-end fashion brands and shows reflecting these differences in their composition of models? The lack of minority representation in high-end fashion brands affects self-perception of consumers, particularly young girls and women. We must not compromise the self-esteem and well-being of young people of color simply to sell high-end clothing. We must improve and market real bodies and real people in fashion, so that the fashion industry can reflect the diverse faces, bodies, and abilities of the world.
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“We set our own standards, and we are not concerned theamountingaboutuptotypicalstatusquo”
Textures of Stinson BY KATHERINE CHEN
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A PHOTOSPREAD
Stinson
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This place used to drag me down and force my chest to the asphalt for beat up Jeeps to run on while pushing twenty over. Today, however, it was a symbol of baptism; returning and healing. I doused my breakfast with blood red strawberry syrup.
WORDS BY GARRETT OMAN | VISUALS BY ANNA CHANG
“No, it is too dangerous!”
As I walked back, I walked through a lit campus that beamed the night away like a country club golf course. So well lit that the night had not quite begun for the critters in the bushes and creeks. The squirrels operated near the garbage cans that lay in manufactured rays. The birds were running their paper routes at midnight. I decided to sit down. This sound was unlike anything I had ever heard. There was a pulse in the stream. There was a pulse in this yellow lit, manicured diorama and I had heard it. I put my head into my hands. They were cold and I began to descend deliriously into the crotch of Nature.
“Will we have enough food?”
“Who will care for the children?”
Fall Gallery
“They will go to school”
“Wanna go downstairs for din-din babe?” “Nah I’m good” “Y’all free on Friday night ?” “Sure” It was dark outside when we went. We filed down the tight streets to the spot with a dark violet sign. It sat cast in magnetized fluorescence. It read “Coca Cola” presumably since the pizza was a given. This was the kind of place that charges just a bit too much and opens a bit too late only to close a bit too early. Some may disagree. “Cold pizza for breakfast” anyone? Microwave conversations went in each and every direction. More friends came and sat, and there were now twelve of us sitting there having pizza, watching the looming crisis unfold on the corner television. If there was any light left in the place, it was in the fluorescent floodlit kitchen that continued to run well into the early morning. I pitched my lower half forward in the booth, mixed an Alka Seltzer and then ordered another coffee. As we left, we couldn’t have imagined that this would be the last week of state-sanctioned bliss. I picked the peppers and mushrooms off like a damn fool. I missed a mushroom or two. I couldn’t resist. We all deserve some flavor.
“A semester-no a quarter at most.”
“Do you think the camping trip is still on?”
“We may have to send the foraging party south on the river”.
T
he shingled roof stood out on the side of the highway by its dejected vermillion. The place called to me and I answered. It was not an albatross that hung from my neck, although at one point it had been. Brick buildings are either eye sores or urban marvels these days. This one was dirty on purpose. It’s job was to mend broken hearts and souls. Eating at free standing chain restaurants on the commuter beeline is like having a large pokemon card collection because it manages to take up a lot of time in your busy schedule for no particular reason. They also both thrill my little cousin. We sat next to a nuclear family of high school goths. They ordered their eggs “sunny side up.”
As often as you sit in an IHOP and partake in the sacred covenant of the middle class, I urge you to remember the things which are truly worth living for: Continental Breakfast. The world reflects from the fountains they say, and today all I could see was a new day; replete with ash trays, grey grass mushrooms, and domestic decay. I’ve thrown in all my pennies over the course of the last year. The wet bottom is loose copper and in a few months, with any custodial notice, it’ll be a Bikini Atoll turquoise paradise. They’ll be Squidward-flavored. A damn pleasant color I think. To me, it means money well spent. Luck, to me, is not a foolish expense. Luck is love’s messenger. Bread and Wine For what it was worth, I started panning for love in Strawberry Creek. When I could, I would try to run up the big hill to the beautiful view. The trudge up the loose slope made good use of my ankles but neglected my eyes. God must’ve been smoking a bowl that day in March. I couldn’t see shit. The rocks crumbled under my muddy sneakers. I still had yesterday’s nowmushed corner-store bagels in my bag. I wound down the path to a purple-lit dorm room. My roommate was in the process of undressing a crunch wrap supreme with his eyes. The other was killing snot with a folksy mix of Takis and Sierra Mist.
“We will definitely be back by August.”
I clenched my eyes and emerged on a dark icy Siberian plain. There was smoke that I could smell through the wood in the distance and I made tracks in the snow that trudged from a little water well into a small village. As I walked into the village, I looked to the sky to find Betelgeuse and Pisces awash in a Northern sky over the firelight. There were a group of whale-pale muscle men in furs with large beards gathered around a fire. Moby-dicks. There was a bow legged oracle that the men brooded over for prospects of the coming days.
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“But we don’t have any goats”.
“This dark day will lead to the greatest harvest”
He was probably studying geometry at this point, specifically the dimensions of the place and its availability for pricing or subletting. Perhaps he could switch locations. He was going through his late night “where were you, you smell like sweat and whiskey” contingencies. His mind was in its death throes. There was a conversation about Hemingway as well. I remembered that he liked the one with the Marlin fishermen in Cuba, which he said always reminded him of this painting he had seen once. Dark Greenwich Village avenues met with the bright lights of a diner. On the inside, despite the lighting, everything is tense and the world around is dark. A couple share a coffee and cigarette and the attendant bounces behind the bar. A new painting, this time from the downstairs basement. It’s a muddled, ugly painting of a cafe. Red and green colors surround a decaying old beige pool
“Only a sacrifice will expel the night and bring us under the yoke of the Great One”. “The fire will have to do”.
“It’s the only damned place that still has a pipe organ,” MomEverysaid. other church has since grovelled to the rock band and although I’m not Christian anymore and I’ve never exactly been conservative, I’d take a pipe organ any day.
Pastor Herm now stood in a darkened empty sanctuary in a massive Hawaiian shirt and read the names of those who had died. The little church is right in the middle of a retirement community and Pastor Herm was usually the one who stood by everyone when they died with his big, caring, gin-blossomed, Idaho face. He was a comfort item to many, but this clergyman could stand by no one and comfort no one now. He stood dejected and dishevelled like a teddy bear that’s been dropped in the small crevasse between the bed frame and the wall; like that extra french fry you accidentally leave at the bottom of the brown greasy bag. God must have grown too old for toys and junk food. The teddy bear spoke,“The important thing to remember everyone is that we survive by the Grace of God and by the resurrection of Jesu’ Christ, his only begotten Son.”“May God bless those who make the hard decisions to bend towards the will of God and his justice.” “We now honor those we have lost in the past week.” “Auf ihr wohl.” “Feel free to join us on Friday for our virtual ice cream social.” Quand on a pas ce que l’on aime, il faut aimer ce que l’on a. We went out to lunch. The window of the place faced towards the street. It was too clean on the inside. We were all alone sitting on the bench. I loved this place and it was almost dead. As an honest resident of Arizona, there are relatives that I cared less about than this little Mexican restaurant. Picking up my order, I looked around to find that the owner was staring blankly across the street from the kitchen. I could see him clearly, stuck in thought, as he scanned the scarlet horizon. We had spoken earlier as I knew him well and he had asked what I was studying.
“No more than a semester I reckon.”
“Only a sacrifice will cover the fields in wildflowers. Only a sacrifice will clear the routes of snow for horse and ox”.
“We have no horses and oxen. There is not one left alive”
“History and literature, huh.”
“How will I wipe my ass?” The oracle quieted them and released the guidance of the forest sprites.
And so began the dance of Diaghilev. Women and children emerged from the raised muck huts and their pale faces shone through the high flames. Young maidens stumbled on ice towards the circle from the dwellings. The oracle stood them in the mud and with a flush of her wooden crook each began to violently shake. They frothed from their mouths as they collapsed. The men, as they watched in cowardly silence, began to bleed from their eyes and ears. They raised their hands only to find porous Pollock dripping from their jagged fingernails. Chaos ensued as the oracle hovered over their youngest. With the raising of her hand all returned except for the runt who continued to froth, shake, and scream in the mud. She became as pale as marble. They closed in on her in hasty anger. I could no longer see her. Soon, there were screams and then a massive plume of smoke drifted her away. I stood face in fists with the cold criminals as the sun rose up over the blue capped mountains. I woke up sick to my stomach; shuddering from the smell of stale cigarettes and grassy spring. I walked back from that small yellow creek. I had eaten my dumb little pizza, but I could not help but think of the future. I counted the hours. I sat silently on the 18th hole of my childhood with very little to work off of. I lost my scorecard and my reptile doppelganger, Billy Joe Lizard, had driven the cart into the water hazard in a Michelob Ultra fueled stupor. I slid back into the purple room and began to caddy pack my bags in the electric purple-tinged rain. There was a package of plastic masks that my roommate, the Taco Bell seducer, had left on the table. This you take for granted and yet this you take for life and salvation. I woke up to find that everyone had left. I stared out of my window and into the blue, cloudless void of my own eyes. The sky indicated that I no longer had friends to see and love to make something of my early mornings and late nights. I was lost. Steak and Potatoes January was the worst month. I was at home in Arizona. I sat wrapped like a golden beige fleece burrito on the leather living room couch. I looked out the window as Flagstaff’s forests hovered in ash above. Church sermonsw were online and we took communion with mass produced Merlot and Velveeta mac in our laps upon the porcelain altar. Cajuns, proud cajuns all! Laissez les bon temps rouler. Thank God, our video was off for Zoom Jesus on Sundays. If only the Venetians could see us now, if only Shakespeare, if only our own damn white trash grandparents.
“No... the government cannot be trusted. They are better off “Whenhere”will the herd arrive?”
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“You saw the Goya poster again, didn’t you boy.”
“Machaca con Huevo”.
The next day the restaurant was gone. There are some who want to free monsters and have it out amongst us. Those people don’t realize that the man who created the monster only created it so that he could watch it while he ate. He made it so he could feel proud of himself. He made it so he could have his friends over and boast. He did not make it to scare little boys and the even littler men they grow up to be. I, myself, am privy to making monsters of my own. Hell, I am making one right now. There are real problems in this world. In the distance, there were two large plumes of smoke. One came from a coal power plant and the other was a forest fire that had killed a family of five. I took out a cigarette as I boarded up the windows to that old place. Resquiat in pace, for lack of cash. “Manuel’s”, 1965-2020. Send your crocodile tears to their PO Box. The old man’s dead from COVID and my friend is in the hospital to get off the crank.
Tell me… what is the scariest thing you saw in your childhood. When I mean childhood, I mean younger than eight. For me, it was the monster that lived in that bathroom stall. As I turned into the stall, which no longer had a door, I saw it again. No growing up could make the picture any less clear, and no place made me as claustrophobic as that medieval dungeon.
table and set on shelves around it is a hypnotically horrific host of spirits. The old man behind the bar had gone down to the basement, where the pool table was, to smoke a pipe and box up the last of the pictures on the wall. He held little league teams, butterflies, and Frank Sinatra’s fat head in his arms. His checkbook was on the table. It was turned over with a half written alimony payment faced down. He was shaken but not yet stirred to reconcile his troubles with Saint Don Julio. The time was 3:30 in the afternoon and the paint just kept being layered and layered and layered on.
I had to pee, and so I asked for the restroom key. They had the back door open at the end of the hall and you could see my old high school classmate throwing away crates of fresh apricots and chiles in the dumpster. The grim repo man was eating poblano relleno in the corner. I walked down the hall and softly kicked open the door to the restroom. It was just as dank and dark as I remembered, but this time it was worse. When I was four, I was scared of that restroom with all my heart because there was a large dia des muertos skull painting on the wall over by the sink. Today, it wasn’t there anymore and the stall door had been flung off its hinges.
“Yes “Neversir”got over that, huh?” The more things change the more they stay the same. I walked back to the bench where my family had now gotten the food. I took my to-go box and looked at the label on the top.
Tears make for a horrible beef marinade. I held my friends and family close that day.
Milk and Honey The weeds would burn up and the summer would draw us all inside. There were some who fought against the onslaught. My cousin is a nurse and today she is probably tired; today she is probably induced to day drink like an old prospector. In miner speak, it is because she was beckoned down the lift by the promise of gold and emerged with nothing but black lung. Surely all of that can now be put behind us, for her sake at least. There was a period in the past year where Maricopa County was the most dangerous place in the world. The Angel of Death passed over the desert and spared those of us with the large blood-covered door frames, the deepest pockets, and the highest raised Ford trucks. Soon everyone went back outside
Saturn, crazed and emaciated, squatted in the pitch dark and stared back at me. He slowly ate and you could hear the crunch of cartilage and tendons. The brute jumped out at me in horror and I immediately ran. I slammed the door behind me and put my ear to it. I swear I could still hear the chewing.
25spring 2021 / calibermag.org and it was time for school again. We wormed our way back to the restaurants, back to the hotels, back to the airports, and back to our offices. It all made sense, but the last few months have shown that making sense never really mattered. I stood on my parent’s porch as red-hatted simps walked by on the sidewalk. I looked at my tuition bill and immediately had the urge to move to a cabin in the woods.
I didn’t move to a cabin in the woods. I went to Walmart. And then I went to pick up my little cousin for his first day of third grade. It was still early so we hit up IHOP. He wanted some chocolate chip pancakes; so did I. We talked about popcorn, Youtube, Rocket League, astronauts, baseball, legos, and what it would be like to ride in the batmobile. He told me about Disneyland and because I’m a Disney villain, I decided to order an extra coffee and have him try it. After our short stay in the convent of carbs we were out in the parking lot again. I took my little cousin to school. It was his first day back. I was on the road now and he was doing times tables in the back seat. Daffodils grew under the guardrails and my mind drifted towards the left lane. The car went with it as we entered the parking lot. I opened the door and wished him well. We each went our separate ways, on call to the places which called to us. The sun rose up into the sky. I felt a river flow- its silt and muck turned to a faunish green in the beating August sun. The rocks and the banks girdle it. Its course is set through the blue capped mountains of tomorrow. There are no more albatrosses, they have flown North. There’s no more smoke, the trees have all burned up and the buffalo are dead. Maybe the levee will break. Maybe Jesus will come. Maybe the North Koreans will try and nuke us. Maybe Trump will come back. No, I doubt it. I doubt all those things. It’s breakfast in America and, in America, breakfast is quite serious these days. I look forward to when they are better. Love, luck, and each other are all we’ve got. Flip a penny for me and I’ll return the favor. In the desert sun, we’ll turn turquoise together. Cheers.
New York City
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A PHOTOSPREAD BY ANNA CHANG
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And even for viewers like me who aren’t too familiar with the Midwestern Korean-American experience as someone who grew up in Southern California, Han notes that “Minari will provoke bittersweet nostalgia even in viewers who don’t recognize the language or the food or the very Korean props, like an earwax remover or a bag of dried anchovies.” Throughout the film, there is an easiness to the way that Korean culture is painted in the background and daily lives of the Yi family. Not only the Korean props that could be spotted during the film but the nonchalant way that the kids, David and Anne, switched between Korean and English; how the parents, Jacob and Monica, would reply both in Korean and broken English; and the hopes and dreams that the Yi family carried with them were all things that were intimately familiar.
At its core, Minari is an immigrant story which is why it inspires relatability. We see the immigrant story at work as the Yi patriarch, Jacob, works to achieve the “American Dream” of achieving selfmade success regardless of background, even at the cost of his family’s stability and his marriage. The “American Dream” as the term we know now was first popularized by James Truslow Adams in 1931, who calls it the “dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with the opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement.” The dream of gaining upward social and economic mobility, of crossing the class and racial lines that kept one restricted from property and business ownership, was what called so many people to emigrate from their homelands. Many who crossed oceans and borders for their own dreams can’t help but understand why Jacob Yi is so desperate to succeed, even if they don’t condone the way Jacob puts his family the dream of Minari
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WORDS BY REG LIM VISUALS BY CHARLENE WANG
he trailer for Minari immediately caught my attention, as I watched I knew right away that when the film was released, it would have me bawling. The rarity of a film about a Korean immigrant family in the U.S. brought myself and others a sense of collective experience across the diaspora, as we tuned into a film that finally spotlighted the Korean immigrant experience in the U.S. For the Korean diaspora in the U.S., there are details and textures to Minari that are familiar and comfortable, like returning to the dream of childhood days and when ‘America’ felt like something unknowable. Critics like Angie Han from Mashable talk about this dreamy familiarity, in how “the vocabulary and rhythms of Minari’s dialogue are rooted in a version of family life that feels familiar to me, myself having been a kid raised in 1980s America by Korean parents who’d recently emigrated.”
T
The casual and cruel ways that Jacob puts the “American Dream” above his family becomes one of the main conflicts alongside Jacob’s struggle in farming. From using the family’s main source of water, eventually racketing bills so high that the kids need to clean themselves with buckets of water brought from a nearby river, to bringing his crops to a hospital visit about David’s heart condition as a way of advertising his farm — Jacob makes decisions that we find hard to stomach even as we understand his actions.
The Yi family’s story of attempting success through farming is a story that has been repeated across the century.
Khristopher J. Brooks’s “Redlining’s legacy: Maps are gone, but the problem hasn’t disappeared” notes that banks and other lenders frequently rejected borrowers based on their race and location. The inability to accumulate capital for property ownership meant that many Black and Brown communities would be stuck in a cycle of poverty as less and less money circulated in the communities. By the end of the day, the “American Dream” is truly a white dream which ignores the privilege afforded by one’s background and connections, only pointing to “hard work” and “determination” as the reason behind one’s success. Still, Minari does the work of expanding the KoreanAmerican artistic canon and shows the success in making room for more diverse stories in the writing room and in theaters. Hannah Bae’s film review, “In Its Joy, “Minari” Expands the Boundaries of the American Dream,” points out how the film turns away from the usual beats of the immigrant stories we see on screen of generational trauma, violent racism, and patriarchy. Minari offers us a new story about the Korean-American community and the successes possible for the community without relying on gratuitous displays of violence or trauma. As someone who doesn’t get to see genuine portrayals of Korean-American culture on screen, I cried in joy and anger with the Yi family. But what does it mean that the most relatable story about KoreanAmerican success is one that is based in a proximity to whiteness? Now, as the Asian community has better access to upward
34 spring 2021 / calibermag.org and relationships at risk.
During the first large emmigrations of Koreans to the U.S in the 1900s, many Korean immigrants tried their hand at farming. Jiwon Kim’s “Korean Immigrants’ Socioeconomic Adjustment in California (1905-1920),’’ describes how one Korean immigrant, Kim Chong-lim, began to earn an income estimated at $300,000 through rice farming. Success stories like these are what attracted Koreans to immigrate to the U.S. during periods of strife and struggle after WWII, as well as the Korean War. As more and more Koreans immigrated to the U.S., with tight-knit communities forming in cities like Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — some families traveled further into the heartland, straying away from the brimming diasporic communities in the U.S. The Yi’s journey into white, rural America is one that many real-life Korean immigrant families will find familiar. Of course, Minari’s awareness as an immigrant story striving for the “American Dream” means that we see the characters explicitly discuss the yearning and cost for thriving in the U.S. In a conversation between Jacob and Monica in the hospital, Jacob asks, “Life was so difficult in Korea. When we married, remember what we said? That we’d go to America and save each other. Remember?” to which Monica only replies, “I remember.” But of course, Jacob imagines saving the family through the dream of becoming his own boss, a self-made man, even as it becomes more reasonable for the family to move back to California, where there are jobs more readily available for Korean immigrants, in order to pay back the water bills and other mounting debts. Still, Jacob tells Monica to leave without him when she asks him to come with them to California, stating that “the kids need to see their father succeed at something for once.” When Monica asks, “At what cost? Isn’t it better we stay together?” Jacob only replies, “Do what you want without me. Even if I fail, I have to finish what I started.” During this conversation, the difference in the values and priorities of Jacob and Monica become clear. For Monica, it is her family’s well-being that informs her decisions but for Jacob, it becomes a matter of capital and pride. Minari’s director Lee Isaac Chung says in an interview with Inkoo Kang that he “didn’t want to just criticize the American Dream or just say that’s false. I was more interested in what it is about us that desires that dream, to the point that we would take such a great risk… Jacob is really starting from scratch and creating a new identity. Monica as well. There’s a lot that she remembers, the dreams they had of saving each other and having the best for their family. And all these things are coming into direct conflict with the reality in America.” We see throughout Minari how the idea of pulling yourself by the bootstraps is intrinsically designed for failure. In rural, white America where Jacob struggles to achieve his dream of self-made success, the first hint of success is provided by the order of crops from a Koreanrun and owned market rather than anything white America can provide. It is through the support of his family and community that finally allows him to take a step closer to the “American Dream,” which is exactly why it falls apart as a real path and narrative to success in real-life, as well as within the film. If the “American Dream” is to be able to achieve selfmade success regardless of background, those who firmly believe in and “achieve” the dream forget that it is because of their background that they are more easily able to achieve social and economic success. The Korean-American community and other East Asian communities have better opportunities at upward mobility due to the opportunities for land and property ownership denied to other communities.
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The white gaze is what allows the Model Minority Myth to thrive, in flattening the Asian American community to one which succeeds in all aspects of life (education, career, economic) in order to “prove” that it is not the fact that other racial and ethnic groups aren’t white enough but just don’t work hard enough. Kat Chow’s 2017 NPR article on the model minority myth traces how “AsianAmericans were afforded better jobs not simply because of educational attainment, but in part because they were treated better” than other racial and ethnic groups. And yet, the flattening of the Korean-American community and the larger Asian American community, ignores the stories of Asian Americans in the U.S. who don’t succeed and are also trapped in the cycle of poverty that white America locks people in.
mobility compared to other racial and ethnic groups, we see how the community which is thought of as achieving the “American Dream” even if it wasn’t truly achieved self-sufficiently, become more aligned with whiteness and in maintaining white supremacy. We see this in the rise of Asian-American conservatism, specifically Korean-American conservatism, as demonstrated by the rise of Young Kim and Michelle Steel to GOP House Reps for California in 2021. In the 2020 Presidential election, according to a New York Times analysis by Weiyi Cai and Ford Fessenden, many Asian American voters shifted to the right in immigrant neighborhoods with exit polls showing that Donald Trump gained more support among Asian American voters. By refusing to acknowledge the privilege that comes with being Asian in white America, of only coming into status and capital through “hard work” rather than the access to opportunities denied to other communities, the Asian community is pushed closer to whiteness and begin to have their own skin in the game for maintaining white supremacy since it benefits them as well. Seeing the world with the white gaze means to ignore difference and to take on a color-blind approach to the positions we end up in life. In the white gaze, some people achieve success not because of the color of their skin or their background but because they “happened to know the right people” or their gumption and determination. Regardless of whether other BIPOC were passed up for the same positions of success and status because the “right people” happened to be your family and friends.
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In an interview with GQ’s Chris Gayomali, Steven Yeun comments that “We profess that we’re caught in the white American gaze, and that’s true. But we forget that we are also that gaze. That gaze is encoded into us, and the last boss is yourself.” Yeun hones in on a different kind of white gaze in diverse representation of films, one that enacts much of the same violence of ignoring difference and flattening any nuanced representation of people of color to reductive stereotypes. Importantly, in the same interview, Gayomali mentions that “the term Asian American is a fairly recent invention, younger than bubble wrap and even the computer mouse. It was coined in the late 1960s by two Berkeley activists
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who wanted to lasso disparate immigrant groups into a potentially powerful political identity, inspired by the Black Power movement that preceded it.” Now, as racial and political tensions rise with the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and increasing conservatism within the AsianAmerican community during COVID-19, solidarity is becoming more and more important in the protection and fight against white supremacy and the attractive trap of power it offers.
By the third act of the film, when we see the Yi family’s farm on fire, the literal fruits of their labor burning into the night sky, we know that failure is always lurking in the corners of the immigrant families who come to America. However, the difference for the Yi family and other connected East Asian families in the U.S. is that they get a second chance. At the end of the film, we see Jacob and Monica walk together with a white man who offered to help Jacob find a good location for a well in the beginning of Minari. At first, Jacob turns him away due to the steep price of $300 for his service but now, with the support of his wife, he is doing things the “right” way by relying on his white community. In telling the specific story of Korean-American success, we see how Minari also tells the story of the Korean-American Dream of succeeding through a proximity to whiteness.
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44 spring 2021 / calibermag.org A Nervous Glance At Berkeley’s Stress Culture
I
t is an age-old affliction, and arguably one of the first, one the most prevalent, and one of the quickest spreading pandemics to ever infect college students. It generates organically and spreads through spoken word and physical contact alike. It doesn’t even require in-person interaction to repopulate, and often finds incredible strength and effectiveness by way of social media, instant messaging, and through other online interactions. And perhaps the most daunting characteristic of this body snatcher is not its virality, and not its detrimental effects, but our (“our” especially referring to college students) incredible vulnerability to it. Let’s talk about stress, baby. Let’s talk about you, and me, and everyone else it wriggles into and hypnotizes. The concept of “stress” can be difficult to define. For the sake of this rambling editorial, I will use “stress” quite loosely as any perceptible amount of mental or emotional strain felt by an individual and caused by any demands or circumstances. Although one might criticize how broad this definition spans, I believe it will allow us to more fully explore the concept of stress and address its many shapes and sizes.
To begin, we must first ask the question: do you have stress? Many are quick to say “yes,” as was made clear in the many student interviews I have conducted over the past few weeks. In fact, all were quick to say yes: of the over 20 different students I spoke with, every single one stated they had experienced some amount of stress within the past couple of days, and many reported feeling stressed at some point that same day (this not including the socially anxious who may have beenstressed from our conversation alone).
One
Two Test, I’m YouStressed,Stressed
Many sources were cited, including midterms (the only season worse than Fall, and that’s only because there are no pumpkin-spiced tests), projects (which is just a nicer way of saying more difficult and time-intensive homework) and essays (or the 11:59 typing test that sees how many “as one can see’s” and “this provides a clear example of’s” one can punch out to meet the word count). Additionally, some mentioned social factors, including both platonic and romantic relationships, and oftentimes the messy, unclear line that divides the two. As one can see, these provide a clear example of the current student body’s state of stress. This likely does not come as new information, as the stigmas and stereotypes surrounding Berkeleybrand stress are propagated on and offline by students and non-students. A quick Google search will reveal articles running from College Magazine’s “From WORDS BY CHASE MCLEARY | VISUALS BY KYLE GARCIA TAKATA Test,
Both UC Berkeley News and The Berkeley Beacon have recently written on the COVID-19 pandemic’s harmful contributions to the stress epidemic as well. But possibly more impactful than these is the dissemination of stress by word-of-mouth (because who really reads the UC Berkeley News or the Daily Californian, both of which you probably only see because you’re too lazy to unsubscribe to their newsletters).
45spring 2021 / calibermag.org a UC Berkeley Student: Welcome to the Stress-O-Sphere” to the University of California’s own piece, “Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses” to the Daily Cal’s “Stop glorifying UC Berkeley’s workaholic stress culture.”
Of the students I interviewed, nearly all said they had heard or discussed feelings of stress in conversation within the past couple of days. These conversations resembled my earlier observations, often revolving around impending assignments or exams, prolonged pressures from the pandemic, and uncertainties regarding their social However,situations.what I found most interesting in hearing about these conversations was not necessarily what was said (I don’t need 20+ students to convince me that essays are stressful – I’m so anxious I’ve resorted to using space-filling parentheticals like Jim Halpert uses skeptical camera glances), but rather how it was said. A key facet of Berkeley-brand stress is the dexterously cutting way in which students display their stress; not as admissions to weakness, but as bait for compliments and as signals for superiority. For example, in recounting a recent conversation with a friend about an upcoming midterm, one respondent, Stephanie, noted that their friend underlined the “like, 3 hours of sleep I’ve gotten all week” and emphasized staying up until 2 a.m., 3 a.m., and 4 a.m. because “I’m just always stressed, like more than most people usually are about this IIthink.”donot intend to discount any of the emotions that Stephanie’s friend may be experiencing, and as one who is not facing a grueling computer science project and is instead a Media Studies creative yelling “Oh the Humanities!” while spending his Sunday stuffing an op-ed with cheesy parentheticals (cue skeptical Jim Halpert look), I may not be, as they say, “one to talk.” However, it leads one to think: how often is stress expressed in measurements of allnighters pulled and hours not slept and midterms “I’m definitely going to fail” and schedules that are “so busy, I don’t have any free time” instead of being expressed in terms of meaningful support needed, or concrete descriptions of one’s
“Now that I think about it, stress does come up pretty often when I’m talking with friends,” says Paul, a junior studying economics and data science. “I don’t think we mean to, but it just kind of happens. And when someone starts talking about being stressed… you kind of want to show you’re busy too.” “I don’t usually think of it as bragging, but I guess it sort of is in a way,” answers Arnav, a senior studying chemical engineering.
In fact, in 2015 an associate professor at UC Berkeley researched some of the benefits of “good stress,” including “improv[ing] alertness and performance and boost[ing] memory,” (Greater Good, Jaret). However, our language is evolving with regard to sensitivity and consideration for others, and the pointless, potentially stress-inducing gloating that so often sneaks its way into our conversations on and off-campus, should be included in this growth.Ifyou are experiencing stress, you should not be afraid to address it in a pragmatic, proactive manner. Berkeley’s University Health Services offers a wide variety of stress management tools (UC Berkeley UHS) available to students, and websites like the American Psychological Association host numerous helpful articles (American Psychological Association, 2018) that can assist you in finding a work-life balance. Friends can be another terrific resource for discussing and controlling your stress levels, and studies have shown that sometimes venting can be a good thing (Refinery29, Truong). However, be mindful, and consider filtering that vent, when need Inbe.the end, everyone will experience stress at some point, and everyone will experience stress differently, but if we can develop a more sustainable, a more beneficial, and a more cooperative means of managing Berkeleybrand stress (and if we can remember to stop and appreciate the parentheticals in life), then I believe we can become the sunniest UC in California (and cue the hopeful Jim Halpert look).
Fiona, a sophomore computer science student, echoes this thought, laughing, “Dark eyes are definitely not a thing you should be proud of. Maybe they’re like a badge of honor. Or like a teardrop tattoo except you get one for every all-nighter to pull.” She shows me the sagging blue skin that weighs down her tired, droopy eyes. “I have two midterms on Tuesday and a paper next week,” she says. I sense a hint of pride.It is unfair and ridiculous to suggest that all students never mention stress again. It should not be a taboo subject, the “emotion that shall not be named” with fears that if it is, it will appear instantly. However, before you begin telling others you can try to pencil them in for a 30-minute lunch because you’re completely booked, consider the implications that your words may be having on others. This includes perceived stress. Perceived stress is defined by Health Assured as “feelings about the lack of control and unpredictability than the actual stressors,” (Health Assured, 2019). It’s marked by fears of what “could” happen as opposed to circumstances actively inducing stress. Similar to other harmful emotions, this perceived stress may be triggered or worsened by misplaced phrases and conversational points.
46 spring 2021 / calibermag.org anxiety, or discussions about direct causes and steps that can be taken to address such causes? Though it sounds sappy, maybe the Daily Cal has a point about glorifying stress. Is it possible that our propagation of internal and external pressures not only promotes Berkeleybrand stress, but proselytizes others to buy-in as well? And maybe the copious amount of stressrelated memes on Facebook pages and the overdramatized toxic stress-culture manifestos that fill Reddit and the way in which sleepdeprived students wear eye bags like they’re Burkin or Louis Vuitton are perpetuating our perceptions of our personal stress?
We should not ban all stress-related memes, we should not censor all stressrelated Reddit threads, and we should not wear superficial masks of perpetual optimism.
College students, and competitive UC Berkeley students in particular, are prone to self-comparison, and exaggerating or constantly reminding others of one’s constant stress may amplify feelings of imposter syndrome, may provoke questions of selfworth and self-accomplishment, and may inflict other deleterious effects on others’ mental and physical health (Dijkstra, Pieternel, et al. “Social Comparison in the Classroom: A Review,” 2008). As students construct an echo chamber of anxiety, it may become more difficult to drown out the noise and more likely to ask oneself, “Do I belong here?”
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The Power of Bedouine Killjoys and Slow Jams:
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WORDS BY SAMANTHA MILLER | VISUALS BY JACOB YEH
I n March of 2018 I flew through downtown Oakland in an overpriced Uber to get to the Fox Theater on time. When I finally got there, I rushed in only to wait for the show to Whenbegin.the opener began singing, everything stopped. Her voice was sharp and clear, each syllable carefullychosen. Her lyrics were poetic, perfectly imaginative while still ascribing words to feelings I couldn’t previous pen down. She was alone on the stage with just her guitar, a mic stand adorned with plastic roses, and a small electric candle propped up beside her. As she played, her voice stretched to the edges of the room, hit the corners, and pointed back towards her. As her melodies echoed throughout the theater and in the ears of each listener, we were reminded that she had wandered and found her home on the stage and in this moment. This is Bedouine. When I talked with her in March of 2021, she was just as I had experienced her that night: considerate, mindful, and incredibly cool. In conversation this care became immediately apparent — she approaches everything with an intentionality and level-headedness, allowing her keen observations about the world and her place in it to inform her music.Thestage has not always been Azniv’s home. “I’ve always felt like I’m living between cultures,” she responded when I asked what she wants people to know of her past and where she’s been. Born in Syria and raised in Saudi Arabia, Azniv has experienced the confines and freedoms that come with movement, displacement, and mobility. At age 10 her family moved to the United States when they won the green card lottery, and she has been on the move from state to state ever since. She’s lived on a horse farm in Kentucky, studied at multiple universities during her undergraduate career, and currently has found her niche in Echo Park with her partner and German Shepherd Hans, or as she
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calls him, “Hansie.” A self-proclaimed “homebody,” she recognizes that the geographies of her life translate into the expansive posture of her songwriting. It was only after studying and working in sound editing that Azniv found herself recording music of her own, with her first self-titled album released in 2017. On stage she is still Azniv but goes by the name Bedouine — a feminized version of the word meaning “a nomadic Arab of the desert.” When Azniv began producing music it came naturally. Rather than sitting down to write for an album, she collects her musings and meditations in a sort of “song reservoir” which she pulls from and adds to. Azniv described both of her albums as “journalistic... a cobbling together of different emotions and stories.” But the flow of these songs aren’t random and have been widely wellreceived. In 2017 Pitchfork praised the depth and brilliance of her debut album, in 2018 she recorded a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, and in 2019 she was deemed an“Artist You Need to Know” by Rolling Stone. For Bedouine, things seem to just keep getting better. But the prominent recognition or the adoring fans (like me) isn’t why Azniv does it. “For me it’s really truly about honoring the emotions that you’re reflecting and trying to put down and put away even.”
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She spoke bluntly — “It’s really self-serving I have to admit, I’m doing this to work through something.” But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. The genuinity of her experiences expressed lyrically is one of the things that first compelled me about her music. She continued to say, “If we don’t reckon with that ourselves and just reflect on that and let it out a little bit, it’ll hurt and continue to hurt us.”
Music is Azniv’s way of reckoning with the world, whether she’s processing political climates abroad or the gentrification happening in her own neighborhood. In 2020 she released a cover of “The Hum,” a sarcastic and smart
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rumination about Nixon’s Watergate scandal. She attributed her desire to write about politics as a “primal instinct” and sees her songs as op-eds, necessary acts of coping with her astute observations of the hypocrisy she witnesses. Azniv also spoke to the title of her most recent 2019 album, Birdsongs of a Killjoy, which was a blending of the personal and the political. In other interviews she cited the title’s inspiration as being deemed a “difficult woman” by others or to paraphrase, a killjoy. She explained to me how the title and other expressions of femininity or identity she speaks to in her songwriting are a means of protest.
“Taking ownership is one of the biggest protests you can make,” she stated, acknowledging ownership is a means of subverting insecurities into a public profession — that there is nothing to hide. In revolution, she elaborated, we take ownership or account of the past to demystify our present and build a roadmap for doing better. In terms of what’s next for her, Azniv wants to keep writing, learning, and producing. Despite her wealth of experiences, she aspires to maintain a beginner’s mind — ready to try new things in order to continuously bolster growth. She still wants her music to be universally received, continuing to not shy away from shared experiences while making uniquely personal music. One of the most memorable parts of meeting with her was when she performed her song “Solitary Daughter” per my request. Hearing her song in this setting, I felt so clearly the lower-yourheart-rate nature of her music which she had mentioned, and simultaneously the excitement that comes with the raw power of an artist communicating themselves honestly to others. I think we have a lot to learn from Azniv. May we continue to return to our own sort of song reservoir til it runs out, and in those moments dig our well deeper so we can fill the world with thoughtfullynurtured ideas again (and again).
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The town is a small one nestled into the crook of San Bruno Mountain, held in what I imagine to be a giant bowl: Brisbane on the inside, a gradient from San Francisco to Daly City on the outside — 20.1 square miles holding 4,500 of San Mateo County’s 754,700 residents. Brisbane is a terracotta town spattered across the inner rim of the mountain, the backyards turned hiking trails near the top sliding into the main town pooling at its center, and with all the necessary guts on the way down: a swimming pool, a library, one good coffee shop, a park with swings. I punctuate a youth here by wildfire and hikes to the billboard facing Highway 101, walking along freeway roads and trails, asphalt and dirt, and all beneath the alternating contrails of airplanes and hawks alike. In this way, I am raised in inbetweens, pressing my silhouette against the small town in the center of the Growingworld.upin Brisbane, I am allowed to feel very big for small reasons. We play field games with the whole school on a single blacktop, awarding red ribbons for cup stacking and double dutch contests.
Dance recitals, soccer games, and science fairs had the same rotating cast list of teachers, coaches, and parents who fundraised — everyone knew everyone and had the yearbooks to prove it. I watched middle school teachers become town mayors become middle school teachers yet again, and all with the understanding that I, too, might be known that way. That is, not by specificity of preoccupation or deed, but by being a name on that cast list, and innately so.
Approaching college, I set out to do the things I’d been allowed to believe I was good at. When I read my old applications I gristle against dreams of dancing on new stages, painting new things, discovering new cures — a conviction only a potent mix of afterschool dance lessons, library art classes, and middle school science fairs could produce. I suppose I thought the world would be no different from its mountain guarded center, and so I left for UC Berkeley in the fall of 2017 with the conviction that I was simultaneously too small and too big to fail. But even in those new beginnings I saw the Brisbane I was leaving behind changing too. The streets, once full of scooters and trick or treaters and kick balls gone astray, were now slowly emptying itself of its youth. Soccer teams without
Ode to Origin Brisbane, California newness in old places
WORDS BY JENNIFER CO | VISUALS BY EMILY QUE
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Chasing the words for where the last four years at Berkeley have left me, I feel I’ve worked very hard to arrive at old truths. I learned to do things in spite of being bad at them, quantum mechanics, in many ways writing, the entirety of the physics 7 series; and still more, because I am bad at them, painting blurry and mottled skies, dancing with strangers, singing off key into a Jaguar’s mic or firetrail peak. I am less sure of myself in a very hard earned way, and look to the future with that kind of weighty unknowing. I have the feeling that I am not who I thought I would be, and for that I am glad, as perhaps the best things in this life are unanticipated, but I am also unsure of who I am in its stead. I have spent a long time in college under the impression that I ought to wait to know those answers before moving, moving on or moving forward or moving anywhere at all. How often I have pushed off my introspect in the name of all that which seemed to be much more tangible, midterms and deadlines and projects with mission statements — moments big enough to carry my self actualization. I think of all the times where college had left me empty and unsure, running out of ways to convincingly signal my vitality, and I think, still more, how empty and unsure I must have been to think vitality, a matter of mere signalling. I am still grasping the words for what exactly felt wrong to me then, but I had always held on until the next milestone, the next event, the next enrollment session, even, to recalibrate and take inventory. Now, twelve months into the pandemic, I see where I have been trying to get away with something much similar, waiting for the virus to be over before processing what has occurred. But these days I am struck by a much
But driving my mother’s car now to the yellowing student drop off section, I see the town is not so much full of ghosts as it is rather expensive dogs: shiba inus and akitas wagging their tails through the farmers markets we never used to have. The library, the glorified tree house I’d take dance lessons under, is dimming its lights next to its remodeled version down the street: an orange building with rounded edges and a flyer advertising 3D printing. Next to the new library is none other than a Boba Guys tapioca shop. I think of the onslaught of boba stores slowly chewing their way through Telegraph and Downtown Berkeley, and frown at the omen rocketing above the ashes of Brisbane’s closed businesses. Though perhaps bold of me to assume Brisbane would escape the grasp of gentrification, I look out the window and am left thinking how life hardly changes the way we expect it to, and how the reflection of the person looking back is hardly an exception.
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players were disbanded, displaced and merged with other towns; students graduated and teachers grew older, memorialized onto the plaques of the cafeteria walls. There was a time I was convinced that I would return to this city as a mere visitor and be met with a ghost town, the center of the world having crumbled into itself.Iwrite this now in March of 2021, the anniversary of many unknowing lasts at Berkeley, and just months before ending right where I began: graduating in the crook of San Bruno Mountain. In many ways, life is at an unforgiving pause: between watching things turn past tense in the wake of the pandemic, mourning what’s been lost as much as what never became mine to lose, and a future bright enough to hope for that simply isn’t here yet. It seems four years has pulled me no further from the inbetween. I write lab reports and send off problem sets from a window in a room that’s long outgrown me, the ghosts of my old Lego sets above and surrounded by the posters plastered in my absence. The mountain trails I climbed growing up stare back at me now after our four years apart, and we blink at each other while taking inventory of all the ways we have and haven’t changed, daring this reunion to mean something.
Brisbane’s elementary school has seen through all six of my family members, watching the same hand me downs and lunch boxes trickle down from me to my sister, my other sister, two brothers, and now our youngest at seven years old. When I go back on campus to pick up her assignments for the next week of virtual first grade, I pass the cement stairs I’d pressed mosaic tiles into as a ten year old, a sharpie mickey mouse with peace sign ears adorning the concrete alongside a scraggly rendition of a bouquet of roses — a collage of the only things I knew how to draw at the time. The patches of grass I used to mine for daisy chain fodder are balding now, as are the worn handles of the same faded blue doors I took my fifth grade graduation photos against, crying about the prospect of endings as if there weren’t a pool party happening to bleach them all away later that afternoon.
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When I look back at my time in Berkeley I think of the glimmers of livelihood that were footholds for me on the way. I think of my roommate and I splitting 11pm Thai food (always 11pms and Thai food) and getting piercings the next day. I think of how impossibly blue the sky is over the glade. I think of dodging flyers on Sproul. I think of handing out flyers on Sproul. I think of pushing a stranger’s gig car past the Greek Theater and the piles of wine bottle corks on Pimentel’s roof. I think of the sunset from Evans. I think of midterms I shouldn’t have passed and midterms I definitely should have. I think of my chosen strangers, the faces I would see on the glade, combing through the chairs in MLK, in the depths of a concert on Sproul, or cradling grocery bags on the 51B. I think of watching my friends read lines that I wrote on stage, and still more, the conversations and constellations of every line that didn’t make it. I think of the way I carried a map of campus in my journal my entire first semester at Berkeley. I think of the way I still got lost in Dwinelle in my last. I think of the way my eyes burned leaving the coolness of FSM’s overhang and the dim green arrays of North Reading Room’s desk lamps. I think of nights where I felt limitless and days where I caught the sun faltering down, a reminder that all of it, bright as it was, was temporary. I think about a sensitivity willing to remember all of these things, keep them for later, find meaning in how it makes the world tilt, and think how maybe this is all I am, at best and at worst, blinking at my reflection in the childhood home. Life as we knew it has yet to return, but a deeper knowing inside me feels that the return is no longer the goal. I roll my eyes at myself for all the days spent waiting for tangibility to smash it’s way down the horizon, knowing that the sky was turning either way. I am at home now, still, afterall, and turn my eye towards the mountain in a new old light. I see my five siblings and two parents, suddenly under one roof again, perhaps for the last time. I see the sculptures and paintings my neighbors are putting up in their gardens, handwritten letters in the mail, planes daring to leave and planes kind enough to return. I see the way my sister’s face lights up around dogs twice her size, friends that I spent grade school hiking the mountain with daring to ask what’s next, getting jobs or moving away or daring to do nothing at all. I see the rounded letters of my handwriting in the mosaic tiles that line the elementary school, the same swing set where I got my first bee sting still sitting on the blacktop, only taped off now.
louder inquiry, the undercurrent of every dark and aimless night in Berkeley having followed me home: Why wait to feel alive? Or rather, why wait to live?
I see myself, hiking the same trails of my childhood, tracing all the roads I’ve walked now, from Daly City into San Francisco, onto the Bay Bridge and, behind that, Berkeley. I stand on the mountain top and wonder if I have made it, if all this life has meant what I had hoped it to be from here, some four years ago. I think the answer is not at all, and for that, I am grateful, as perhaps the best things in life have been unanticipated. I am thinking of all those milestones dotting my years at Berkeley, but even more, the many endings and beginnings that happened in the inbetweens, all the chapters that started and closed unannounced. I write this knowing that I am headed for many more rounds of that, in ways that will continue to escape my words, in ways that will fill my memory later, in ways I am alive enough to be sensitive to, even right now. And so, more than anything else, I write this in gratitude for the small town rising and crumbling and turning still more in the center of the world, as it’s not often you get to change alongside a place. I thank Brisbane for her witness, and look forward to meeting each other again, on the other side of whatever’s next.
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WORDS BY ANNABELLE LONG | VISUALS BY KATHERINE CHEN
A Year of Car Trouble and Luck
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n January 1, 2020, my family’s 13-year-old minivan died on the journey from Sea Ranch, California to my home in Sacramento. As we rounded one of Highway 1’s many graceful bends, the steering, ungracefully, gave out. The van lurched forward, almost willing itself to complete the turn its driver had started, but decided it could not; it would not. And so we found ourselves stranded in the middle of the highway, directing traffic around a smoking minivan and desperately hoping that someone would stop to help us or that we would somehow get cell service before the sun set.
After nearly an hour of waiting and thrusting our phones skyward in search of service, two Fish and Game wardens spotted us. We were likely the most distressed animals they encountered all week. I don’t imagine the abalone they save from poachers ever cry or fumble around for their AAA membership cards. My dad used their radio to call AAA and request a tow, while my mom, two younger sisters, our dog, and I set off to find the lodge that the wardens told us was just a little way down the highway. We walked on the narrow stretch of muddy earth beside the highway through the ever-darkening woods, looking to the vastness of the Pacific for reassurance when gaps between trees allowed for it, and reached the lodge after a little more than a mile. It was perched atop a cliff our minivan very well could have plunged over if the steering had given out just two minutes later. That was our first stroke of luck; our second was that the lodge was dog friendly. We sat uncomfortably amongst vacationing San Francisco techies with their purebred dogs and $25 charcuterie board appetizers and waited for a taxi to traverse the cliffside highway and rescue us. We made it home that night, after the world’s most expensive taxi ride and an hour-long Uber. I kept thinking about how close we were to the waves. How close they were to us. How two minutes and a mile meant we were inconvenienced and not shipwrecked in a 2007 Toyota minivan.Idid not think that the year to follow would always feel that way. That the waves would lap closer, the crests would grow higher, the cliffs separating us would become less stable. That our collective steering mechanisms would give out.
By the time 2020 was halfway over, six of my relatives had contracted and recovered from the coronavirus. June brought scorching temperatures to Sacramento and the discovery that my cousin believed in QAnon. The world as I once knew it was nowhere to be found, and to too many people, it seemed that the basic terms of reality were up for debate. It was nothing short of disorienting. I spent those early months of the pandemic doing little other than walking around the Sacramento neighborhood of my childhood for hours each day. I wore through shoes,
Butrandom.thecircumstances
sweat through shirts, and eventually took up running to accomplish the same meandering in less time; to make room for more nothing. The world was moving quickly but my life was moving achingly slowly. It felt as if the world had done something wrong, broken some mirror that ensured seven years of bad luck, walked under a ladder, or stepped on a crack in the sidewalk. Of course, the world hadn’t; the confluence of a global public health crisis, economic devastation, justified public reckonings with hundreds of years of racial injustice, and worsening climate change all were the result of actual decisions made by actual people and fed off of one another. None of these events, ultimately, was all that that created these moments of crisis certainly felt unlucky, however probable I knew them to actually be. A history student is supposed to believe in trends and patterns and consequences for actions and repetition and I did—I do—but it seems to be the human condition (or at least, the narcissism of youth) to believe that one’s circumstances are unique, that no one has ever experienced straits quite so dire, or at least, straits not dire in quite the same way. And so I did, despite my own good fortune amid chaos and everything I had ever learned about history.
On August 15, 2020, my family’s 15-year-old Prius died before I could even begin to drive from Los Angeles to Sacramento. I woke up early, hoping to get to the Grapevine before the midday sun did, but found that the car would not start. I got a jump, and then drove across the city with my windows down and AC off, sweating in the morning heat and my own anxiety, hoping that the Prius would survive the inevitable stop-and-restart of a pre-Grapevine gas fill-up. It was not to be. Every single warning light on the dashboard flashed as I approached the Grapevine with the temperature nearing the 100-degree mark, I pulled over while fighting the tears. AAA said there was nothing they could do and that my membership did not cover a 300-mile tow. I called or cautiously drove to every auto shop in a 10-mile radius and was turned away from all of them. My last hope, they told me, was the local Toyota dealership. I sat in front of a plastic partition and sweat into my reusable face mask in the lobby of the Santa Clarita Toyota dealership for six hours, worried that I would leave Southern California without a car and with the coronavirus. The Prius was miraculously resuscitated, and hummed along happily all the way up California, through an inexplicable August thunderstorm in the Central Valley and hot winds that threatened to incinerate California’s crop lands. I twisted the radio dial as stations faded in and out every few miles. Static somehow felt appropriate. I made it home that night, a seven-hour journey having become a thirteen-hour one. Lucky, I said. Lucky, my parents agreed. The Prius died before it had the chance to kill me in the Grapevine, and then lived long enough to deliver me
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home safely. Lightning like the bolts I saw near Bakersfield that day caused a fire that killed someone in the Central Valley, and it was notButme.on that very same day, lightning struck a forest in northeast California, and started a fire that would cause the state to issue its first-ever fire tornado warning and that would not be contained until two weeks into September. That fire burned nearly 50,000 acres, injured six people, destroyed over 200 structures, and on one September morning, caused the sky in the Bay Area to turn a terrifying shade of orange. The fire I saw the makings of in the Central Valley burned just over 2,000 acres and killed someone. No fires reached my family’s home in Sacramento or my apartment in Berkeley at any point during California’s everlengthening fire season. Lucky. If anything can be lucky when a handful of lightning bolts can cause the sky in Northern California to turn opaquely orange with the ashes of ancient redwoods.
In the Fall semester of 2020, I took a course, over Zoom, on the Roman Empire. Ancient Rome felt as physically and temporally far from a Berkeley choked by wildfire smoke and a pandemic as I could get, and I looked forward to reading about senatorial disputes settled with murder and the drama of armed men breaching the pomerium. I didn’t intend for the readings to feel prophetic in retrospect. In reading the works of ancient writers and historians, I was struck, probably predictably, not by their gorgeous prose or the gory details of war, but by their fixation on Fortune and her capriciousness.
Fortuna, the goddess, was a central figure in the Pantheon and was often invoked when things did not fully make sense: when an honorable general was killed in battle, when the republic crumbled and then rose as an empire, when suffering men were made to suffer more. Fortuna, it seemed, played by no rules, cared for no man, did as she pleased. Something about that — the fact that what we know of ancient history is strung along by references to an unknowable, fickle force — became somewhat of a comfort to me as I looked out at a sky cloudy with ash and pressed a mask to my face every time I went outdoors. Even though, of course, Fortuna was not pulling all of the strings; Catiline or Eutropius or Honorius were. But to ancient historians and to me, she made their lives and decisions make sense when they didn’t.
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On December 17, 2020, I crashed my family’s 15-year-old Prius while I drove from Berkeley to Sacramento for Winter Break. It was more than a fender bender but less than a wreck, and everyone was alright except for the Prius. I rear-ended a pickup truck on I-80, punching a hole in the Prius’ front and poking a dent in the truck’s back. The crushed headlight, somehow, stayed on as my sister and I trembled on the side of the highway for an hour and a half and winced every time a semi blew past and rattled the eco-friendly exoskeleton we sat inside of. As is now my habit, I called AAA. When the dispatcher asked if the vehicle and I were in a safe place, I said no, that we were a
Sallust lambasted Fortune in his writings on the Catilinarian conspiracy and the fall of the republic, Boethius attempted to make sense of her dangerous whim, and Claudian ridiculed her when squabbling with a consul in the other half of the empire.
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foot from the right lane of I-80 and could not go anywhere else. That was the wrong answer; “no” is reserved for cars and people shipwrecked at the bottoms of cliffs or melting in ditches in the desert. If my situation did not warrant a call to 911, I was in a safe place, the dispatcher told me. Alright, I agreed, I was technically safe then, but could someone please come soon? I hung up and spent ten minutes frantically searching the car for my driver’s license. It was in the back pocket of my jeans.
Eventually, someone came. My sister and I stood on the sidewalk outside a Taco Bell drive-through after the Prius was towed away and waited for our dad to arrive from Sacramento. It was 50 degrees outside, but I was freezing, in either a statement about my embarrassingly apparent Californianness or my numbness to what I’d just done.I relegated myself to the back seat as my dad drove us back to Sacramento. People who crash cars should not be anywhere near steering wheels, I said. As he switched lanes and turned corners and drove over the moonlit rice paddies west of Sacramento without rear ending anyone, I thought about luck. How lucky I was that I stepped on the brakes when I did. That I angled the car slightly rightward in the way that I did. That no one drifted into the shoulder while I searched for my driver’s license underneath the Prius. That I have an AAA membership. That my dad was willing to come fetch me after I crashed his car a week before Christmas. It feels wrong, and it is wrong, to attribute survival in apocalypse to something as irresolute and illusory as luck. Luck is easy and it is convenient; it requires no reflection on the privileges that make it likely or the structural disadvantages that are often dismissed as bad luck. Luck is and luck happens, but not really. But I find myself drawn to it despite my better judgements. What else, really, explains the minivan dying where it did, and not a mile farther down the highway? What else, really, explains the Prius’ lights flashing 5 miles from the mouth of the Grapevine, and not 5 miles into it? How else can I possibly understand the good fortune that is lightning not striking the dry grasses north of Sacramento, or the lush forests east of Berkeley? Other things explain the complications of these incidents; good insurance meant the Prius could be fixed after its breakdown, an expensive AAA membership saved the day in January and December, access to quality healthcare meant that all nine of my family members who contracted the coronavirus by the end of the year were adequately cared for and fully recovered. But I struggle with the apparent randomness of the creation of these events: the improbable combination of a failed engine and a flat, landlocked bend on a seaside highway; the erratic, uncertain power of lightning; the reflexive, split-second decision to stomp on the brakes and jerk the steering wheel to the right when faced with the imminent threat of death by poor judgement. I cannot help but think of luck and my apparent personal surplus of it in the face of potentially devastating circumstances. Of Fortuna and the ancient hands who wrote her name.
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As much as I want to reject it, I understand the impulse to think of Luck and Fortune as characters in my life, figures who do things to and for and despite me. They do not explain many things or most things, but I find myself leaning on them like Claudian or Sallust once did. To make sense of things that I cannot understand in any other way. To wrap my head around questions that historical trends, statistics, and literature cannot answer satisfactorily for me. Because sometimes, I have learned, the steering just gives out. The car just stops. Traffic slows down and you just crash. And you will be fine, and it will not make sense. It will be, as far as you know or can understand, lucky.
A Letter to my Younger Fruity Self
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Ibet you don’t know just how fruity you are, but it’s okay, I don’t blame you for not being able to experiment and find out your real identity. You shouldn’t worry though, I’m here to explain some things and hopefully alleviate some of your confusion. Coming out at bisexual to your traditional Iranian family wasn’t easy, the road is long and there are more conflicts ahead, but it’ll all pay off eventually. You’re probably wondering who I am and how I know so much. The answer may be perplexing but I’m you, just six years older and a lot gayer. Before we dive in, I want you to know how far we’ve come, to know that there’s hope ahead. Remember wanting to go to UC Berkeley at 14? Yeah we figured out who we want to be, and we’re more than comofortable expressing all of it; be it a Berkeley student, Iranian, lesbian, or just a more masculine woman. Hopefully you see now that I am not bullshitting you.
no audio, no opinion, no voice. What you’ve seen throughout history is what you get: the “normal” heterosexual relationship controlled by religion. Laws from centuries ago are still worshipped as if they were written last week. You ask why homosexual relationships are banned? Darling, premarital sex is banned because of the religion, have you not learned to adjust your expectations? As humans, we are often blinded by our own views, so seeing alternative sides, especially when emotions are involved, can be quite difficult. I’m here to help you see through the blindfold of anger you are currently wearing. Because once you get past this anger, the next four years will be much easier to handle. Your parents grew up in a close-minded society where people are controlled by fear, with an immense desire to put up a good appearance for other families, so of course they didn’t know how to react to that unexpected news. Reputation is arguably the most important thing to families in Iran and having a gay child is seen as an embarassment and a shame for families. Can you imagine? Your own family summarizing your entire being in only your sexuality, disregarding every other aspect of your character because this one negative thing, this “abnormal choice,” cancels out all of your positive traits. I know, it’s bullshit. What you went through was not okay; no one should feel like their entire being is “unnatural,” no one should want to change themselves just for the sake of their parents’ or society’s approval, but what else do you expect from a country in which being gay is illegal and punishable with jail time and execution in extreme cases? Remember President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to New York where he talked about homosexuality? He was speaking at Columbia University and he responded to one of the students,
WORDS BY AVYSSA ABOUTORABI | VISUALS BY CHARLENE WANG
Remember how terrifying coming out to your parents was; not knowing how they would react or respond and holding hope that they would still love you. Sadly it wasn’t all rainbows and butterflies; actually, there were no rainbows at all. No rainbow cakes curated from their immeasurable love and support; no embarrassing amounts of pride merch welcoming you into your bedroom; no acts of unspoken support. Instead, there was fighting, punishments, name calling and self-shaming. The insurmountable anger you feel towards them right now, while completely valid, I promise will fade with time. You have to, and will grow to, understand that you and your parents grew up in a society where the slang word “les” — short for lesbian — is used as an insult, similar to the F word here in America. People are taught to see homosexuality as a sin and a mental illness, nothing else. In Iran, love is a movie in the 20’s, painted black and white with
Not only that, you also reset your entire wardrobe, which scared the crap out of your mom. She thought wearing button down shirts meant that you wanted to be a guy! It’s shocking how the Iranian culture is accepting of trans rights, but not of other lgbtq rights.
Granted, your mom wouldn’t be okay with either one, but in her mind being a trans man who likes women makes more sense than being a lesbian. The malefemale relationship is what our society considers as the norm, if what they see is aligned with that, then it’s acceptable. Either way just a heads up, she gives you a lot of shit for changing so much. You’d think after five or six years she’d come to terms with who you are, but we’re still working on it. I want you to know that along with all the shit you’ll get, you’ll also feel free; free of societal norms, free of forced heteronormativity, and free of lying to everyone including yourself. With every haircut comes an irreplaceable feeling of empowerment, and with every new piece of clothing comes a sense of newfound liberty. The skirts you got as gifts will be tossed in a bag headed to Goodwill in the hopes that someone who is actually interested in wearing them finds them; your many dresses bought
According to Amnesty International, he identified as a “non-binary gay man,” and was killed by his own family members because of his lifestyle. A group of his relatives abducted him, murdered him, and left his body under a tree. While any reasonable person would agree that the murderers need to be arrested, the relatives haven’t been punished and very well may get away with what they did. Horrific isn’t it?
claiming Iranians don’t have any of these unnatural tendencies and that there are no gay people in Iran; denial at its best! That incident was back in 2007, but a more recent example is the death of Alireza Fazeli Monfared. I hope you’re mentally ready for this.
Amongst all of this homophobia in your country however, you somehow managed to find your desires and develop into your true self. It wasn’t an overnight process, so don’t expect it to be easy. There were four major steps to your character development, each of them aligning with every time you had to “come out” to your parents. Yes, we came out to them four times until they almost fully accepted the fact that we weren’t ever going to be in a heterosexual relationship. The first time is what you already experienced: coming out as bisexual your freshman year of high school which was also the first year you lived in America. In their minds, you were a confused teenager trying to fit in. Remember when our mom said it was a phase and that we were doing this because we wanted to fit in with the society here? In her mind homophobia doesn’t exist in America, so don’t blame her entirely, she was fed the wrong narrative. But now you’re back in Iran trying to hide yourself because their first reaction terrified you. I know what’s going through your mind, you love them so much that you don’t want to disappoint them, but you’ve never been one to back down. So don’t worry, you’ll fight back, you just need some time to recover. The next two years you spend in Iran will be exactly like a rollercoaster. The ups and downs of studying aside, your love for a woman will lead you to breaking up the mock heterosexual relationship you got into just to put your mom’s mind at ease. Avy, love is passion, love is intimate, love is safe; and when someone’s lips touch yours, the sublime feeling leaves you craving more, it doesn’t make you shiver and push them away. He simply wasn’t your type, but she was your person. You were strong enough to end it with him without letting it go further than you were comfortable with. An unwanted kiss, unexpected love, unthinkable desire, all elements of your self-discovery. Let me give you a heads-up, this love opens your eyes and helps you tear the veil of heteronormativity blocking your view of the world, but it also brings a lot of instability. The relationship you want to be permanent will be, but it’ll leave a deep scar you’ll draw stars around eventually.The adventure of becoming your genuine self began with a simple slice of scissors, chopping off the weight of conformity with each inch of your hair. You cut it short even though your parents absolutely hated it—they still do by the way, and they continue to show their preference for your long hair — and that’s when you started getting more ballsy. Where women are expected to conform to societal norms, you went against the tide with full force. Women are associated with long hair, soft voices, and delicate mannerisms. Your short hair wasn’t just a matter of non-conformity, it was a statement, one that sparked — and still sparks — many controversial conversations in your family. The not so sneaky side looks, fake smiles, and backhanded compliments about just how “interesting” your hair looks are things you won’t forget. You’ll start wearing the criticism you receive as a shield, knowing every whisper makes you just the more iconic in school and within your family. Every “but your long curls were so pretty, or soon you’ll miss your long hair,” makes you realize the forced expectations set on women; and every “I made that mistake too, don’t worry,” becomes a sign that women have adopted those expectations, all the more reason you won’t.
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78 spring 2021 / calibermag.org out of fear of being outcasted end up in a vacuum bag and go under your bed. Instead, you’ll buy more oversized t-shirts, specifically from the men’s section, and you’ll add many hoodies to your collection, as comfort clothing or whatnot.
The second time you’ll come out will be frustrating because of the immense sense of treason you’ll feel. On a Saturday morning at an ihop you’re sitting in front of your mom, silent and anxious, in fear of the words you know are about to leave her mouth. The four-year battle is far from over and you’re exhausted from all the lies. Those eight words will always send shivers down your spine: “I want to talk to you about something.” Ah yes, the usual routine: whenever you’ve done something and your mom wants to discuss it, she’ll take you out for food and utter those exact words. The long awaited speech comes next: that she’s brought you to America to be your authentic self, and even though she may not have reacted well four years ago, she’s come to terms with your sexuality. That she wants you to be true to everyone around you, including yourself. That your home should be a safe space and not a source of fear; so all you need to do is tell her if you’re actually dating
the 24-year-old girl you brought home for dinner one night. One tear after another, forced eye contact, shaking hands, and a simple nod is enough for her to know. Hearing how the simple thought of you kissing and showing affection to another woman makes your mom “nauseous as hell,” sparks a great deal of selfhatred, leading to messed up eating habits. But this isn’t the first time that will happen, so you might want to get used to it. Your mom admits she only expressed understanding and acceptance in the hopes that you’d tell her she was wrong; that what you said four years ago when you came out was no longer true and that you needed to try the real thing before abstaining from it. Yes, the “real thing.” Good thing your parents raised a fighter, well, good for you, not so good for them in this case. Once your relationship with the 24-year-old ends, you end up trying “the real thing.” It’s a conflicting situation you put yourself in because on the one hand, it gives you an upper hand for the next time your mom tries to invalidate your sexuality. On the other hand though, you will feel alienated from yourself because it was not at all something you wanted to do. Why did you do it? Because you wanted to leave your mom speechless.
shaking. A tension even valyrian steel can’t cut, you know, she knows, but who will ultimately say it? She asks, even begs you to stop crying and tell her what’s going on. When she stops looking into the camera, you find the courage to say “I’m in a relationship with someone.” No eye contact, no outlashes, just two words: “I know.” The unexpected laughter that comes after shocks you, she asks if that’s all you wanted to say and you nod. “I’ve known for months. You should invite her for dinner,” will be all she says. Crying has never felt this liberating, breathing has never been this easy when your cheeks are soaked in tears, and you finally feel that last chain breaking. Life may be a bit chaotic right now. I know you’re under so much pressure from your mom that you’re doubting if your attraction to women is genuine, but trust me, it is. The best way you can get through this is to “feel your feelings,” as therapists would say. It’s okay to be unsure, it’s okay to want to experiment, and it sure as hell is okay not to be seen as “normal.”
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It’s a sad truth that you will encounter, but at least you will overcome your own fears. I know you don’t like the word homophobia, but baby gay, you have some of that in you. This is not to shame you, but to let you know that you’ll eventually cut it off, just like you did your annoying long hair. No need to worry. The last time you come out is different from the rest. You try lying to everyone, to hide your first ever serious relationship, but they all know. There is a loud silence thickening the air with every lie you tell your parents, waiting to be broken. A pizza box with her name on it is the giveaway. It’s funny how one mistake, one mishap after almost a year of lying and sneaking around, can change everything. The bullshit answer you give when asked about the name is accepted, but not believed. It becomes a game where you lie, and lie, and lie, knowing you’re caught, but not giving up in order to salvage your relationship. A mind game that becomes more complicated every day, how many lies does it take for Avy to give up, seems to be a fitting title forIsolatedit.
In a year or less when you cut your hair, you’ll cut most of your attachments to heteronormativity. Soon being referred to as “unique” will be a compliment, not an insult. It’s just a matter of blocking out other people’s opinions and letting pieces fall into place. It’s interesting just how much life can change when you’re involved in a matter like this. The rollercoaster of life never fails to surprise you and it always has something in its pocket. The years you have ahead of you will leave scars you never knew could be that deep, but with it comes a healing power you never knew you had. Thorns will grow out of your scars to protect you, but they’ll soon be unnecessary when you move to Berkeley and finally have total autonomy of your life. The hardships you’ll endure are much different, they’re real world problems, adult life, if you will. What I want you to know is that you’ll be your authentic self while accomplishing these challenges. Looking back I realize we’ve been through a wonderland of trauma. You’re reading this with a soft innocent heart, not knowing what’s waiting for you, hoping your parents love you enough they’ll take your word for it and let you be. Just, be. Don’t you worry, they’ll eventually learn to do that; you’ll show them the price of not accepting you is losing you. I can’t tell you how or when exactly you will find this strength, but my dear teenage self, you’ll find it. There will be losses along the way; you’ll lose people and pieces of yourself in each city you’ve lived and in the people you’ve called home. There will be pain, but there will also be growth.
You wanted to tell her you tried what she suggested and she was wrong. Don’t underestimate the stubborn mindset of an 18-year-old, you think to yourself. This prompts the third time you come out, not pretty. Ah but every time it becomes less significant, hurts less, and even feels better because it makes you feel like you’re becoming closer to being who you are without having to hide in your own house. Soon you’ll learn that being gay is okay, just like your mom will learn to understand your side. Oh yeah you’re gay by the way, not bisexual. I know there’s still a part of you that wants to feel “normal,” so you came out as bi for fear of your “abnormal” tendencies. You aren’t alone though, a survey in 2014 found that about 17% of young adults in Iran identified themselves as gay, and yet a very low percentage of them will be able to find a way to be their true selves, as you have. There are many people who know they are attracted to the same sex, but refuse to accept it. Internalized homophobia can be so extreme in some people that they ignore their tendencies and force themselves to conform to the heteronormative ideals.
nights spent in your room slowly turning into wallpaper, fading into your thoughts; lies dimming the incandescent glow of your eyes, inhaling fear, exhaling anger, all the new norm. Talks of a couple’s trip with your girlfriend is what pushes you out of your shell. Three rings and your mom picks up her phone, the day you’ve been desperately trying to avoid is here. She’s dying her hair and you’re already
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Late-Stage Capitalism
RealityHyperConsumptionCompulsiveand
Tik Tok as the Epitome and Consequence of
WORDS BY GRETA DIECK
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According to Baudrillard, there are four “phases” of representation that can be applied to the internet. In the first phase, representations reflect basic reality. News articles, headlines, and photos of current events disseminated on the internet function as representations of events that occurred and reflect the real integrity of the event as it occurs offline. A video of a Presidential debate is a basic reflection of reality. The second phase of representation masks and distorts the basic reality of an event, where biases and misinformation are presented as fact. If phase one is a video of politicians speaking, phase two is a Fox News broadcast with pundits churning out ideology and baseless tropes under the guise of true reporting. The third phase, which “masks the absence of a basic reality,” is what Baudrillard asserts begins to pervert both reality and the representation of it. These are representations of reality that are decontextualized and removed from the vicinity of fact and reality, images and gifs that are used as reaction symbols completely detached from their origin. Media derived from reality is circulated on the internet but bears no relation to true reality. At this phase, the consequences of this online distortion begin to have implications for the real world. At the fourth, and final phase, symbols and images “bear no relation to any reality whatsoever: [they are] their own pure simulacrum.” At this phase, content is generated solely for the sake of content generation and consumption, as media is increasingly self-referential. The basic premise of the website Buzzfeed is illustrative of this final phase. The site churns out flimsy “articles” that report on attitudes and ephemeral trends on the internet with titles like, “I am Genuinely Curious if You Think These 29 Reality TV Stars Are Talented or Not,” “Adults Shamed this 17-Year-Old Girl for her Homecoming Dress, And it’s Starting a Whole Conversation About Boomer Hate on the Platform,” or “This Woman Went Viral for the ‘Millenial Rant’ She Sent a Reporter, And I’ve Gotta Say, I Agree With Everything She Said.” The content of these articles is even flimsier: the “Millenial Rant” article essentially transcribes the video, provides a sampling of comments, and reports the number of times the video was viewed. All of this information, of course, can be ascertained by simply watching the video that is being covered. The news functions as a highlight reel
Aking is distraught. His kingdom has fallen into disarray: tradesmen keep getting lost on the winding roads and hazardous terrain, leaving his subjects bereft of crafts and vital resources. Desperate, the king commissions the most skilled cartographer in his kingdom to create a detailed map so the tradesmen can find their way to the villages. After a month of furious calculations and drawings of exacting detail, the cartographer presents the map to the king. Yet the king is dissatisfied. The map is not detailed enough — the villages too pictorial, the forests unembellished, the river a puny line. In order to accommodate a more encompassing level of detail, the map must be enlarged. The weary cartographer toils for several longer, more calculated and ornate months, and presents to the king a map so large it takes three men to unspool. But the exacting king is unconvinced and commissions three more cartographers to make an even more detailed map. Months go by, his subjects bereft and hungry, as the mapmakers work. Riots erupt; the king, cloistered in his castle, refuses to leave for fear of retribution. Finally, the cartographers return to the king and announce they have completed the map. Stepping outside, the king’s feet find not the marble but crackling parchment. The king looks up in delight to see that parchment blankets his kingdom as far as the eye can see. The cartographers have coated his kingdom in a life-size map of unforgiving detail. Such is the allegory employed by Jean Baudrillard to introduce his simulation theory in his renowned philosophical treatise, Simulacra and Simulation. The king’s demand for a more “real” representation of his territory created a medium that was just as detailed as his kingdom and ended up surpassing the actual territory to become more lifelike — instead of trodding on grass and walking among trees, the king and his subjects now live among fabricated representations of grass and trees. Baudrillard posited that the simulation, the map, blurred the lines of reality. The map became more real, as “the sovereign difference between [the real and the representation] that was the abstraction’s charm...disappeared.” Baudrillard takes the metaphor a step further, envisioning the kingdom rotting to ruins under the hegemony of the map. As the parchment too withers away, revealing the carcass of a once-great kingdom, Baudrillard concludes that our attempts to capture and reproduce elements of reality in simulation degrades both the simulation and the integrity of the original thing. We do not live in the age of cartographers and ornate maps any longer; our tools of representation are ridiculously vast. We daily inhale a Kandinsky-esque mishmash of photos, memes, headlines, and videos that still barely comprise a millisecond of our ever-evolving internet-cultural experience. Comedian Bo Burnham, who fittingly rose to popularity on the initial wave of YouTube comedy in the early 2000s, notes the ludicrous excesses of our online space in his piece “Welcome to the Internet,” summarizing the general engagement trend as “a little bit of everything, all of the time.” Far from a mercifully stagnant parchment map, our simulation is a roiling mass of content that not only represents our reality, but influences it.
At the risk of reproducing Black Mirror hysterics, it is not difficult to see how social media fuels the reach and penetration of these simulation elements into our lives. Enter TikTok: a nexus of media consumption, the app is a channel for consuming addictively digestible and hyper-relatable content. The app replicates and expedites the distortion of reality. As on any social media app, TikTok lends itself well to representations, which obviously are not always “true.” Similar to the way that Instagram allows users to produce highlight reels of their lives, TikTok creators can create falsely positive impressions of themselves and their lifestyles. Yet TikTok’s unique structure surpasses the ability of other apps like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to metastasize content. Videos on TikTok are commonly organized around ‘sounds,’ clips of audio sourced from songs or videos that function as blank formats onto which TikToks are constructed. These sounds become distanced from their real context through their initial use; the app necessitates symbolic distortion to Baudrillard’s third phase. When a sound becomes widely used, it is frequently further distorted and spliced into other sounds, producing meta-sounds and references. These irradiating systems of content illustrate the fourth phase: even comprehending the jokes or ideas central to a sound often requires extensive knowledge of the origin and development of the idea or sound. Oftentimes, the sheer degree of extrapolation of an idea is part of the joke itself: like playing a game of telephone, the hilarity stems from the distortion of the original concept to inane levels to the untrained eye. As TikTok user bornagainchristiandior notes, “the best part of watching tiktok by far is watching audios go viral and then undergo the four stages of simulacra in like a week lol.” Far from Baudrillard’s warning that reality would be distorted by the “impossibility of making a distinction between reality and simulation,” this distortion seems to be part of the fun. A glib nihilism pervades on the app — dubbed “floating rock syndrome” — in which young users note the uselessness of doing inane and arduous tasks when their existence is meaningless. One user imitates transitioning from feeling “stressed over homework and work and life” to “remembering...my only job is to look hot n enjoy life.” It is difficult to overlook the way that TikTok’s endless scroll of content, ideas, and perspectives fuels a perception of the individual as a drop in the ocean and fosters a sense of incredulity. The ludicrousness of TikTok is the ludicrousness of Baudrillard’s simulacra: “it no longer has to be rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance… It is a hyperreal: the product of an irradiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.”
Beyond content distortion, TikTok’s feedback and recommendation mechanisms illustrate the consequences of the simulacra for our ways of engaging with the online and material content we consume. The key driver of the app’s insidious contagion is ‘the algorithm,’ a hyper-sensitive recommendation system that vigilantly evaluates how long you watch a video, how quickly you scroll past others, and when you share videos with friends. The result is an intimately tailored profile of your content proclivities. Initially a vicarious model of your tastes and interests, the algorithm comes to precede and guide your organic preferences. The app functions so well as a replication of traditional means of self-actualization that it has the potential to completely replace those other means. Here the map metaphor is refracted: the simulation ascribes and directs our interests and aspects of our lived reality, rather than reality directing the creation of the simulation. Baudrillard, who died in 2007, would likely have noted this phenomenon as an extension of the simulacra into our neurology, reshaping the way we consume media and representing a dangerous blunting of our critical analysis
Theskills.content-based rather than community-based focus of TikTok heralds a new model of internet-social engagement. On Tik Tok, we are passengers, passive and adrift within a metastasizing mass of content. We don’t use the app to connect with our friends or even the people we choose to follow. Tik Tok encourages us to consume with abandon, enshrining us in the world of content creation. In this sense, TikTok represents a new understanding of the term “social media,” where media takes precedence over social engagement. TikTok’s model does not encourage developing communities outside
82 spring 2021 / calibermag.org of already-viral sensations and trends; in this sense, nothing being reported on is novel. What then, is the point of producing and consuming the content? As Baudrillard lambasts, “there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential...a strategy of the real, the neo-real and hyperreal.”
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As we become infinitely more knowable to consumer databases and media platforms like Tik Tok, our wants and desires become increasingly programmable and directable by corporations in a capitalist society that already attempts to predetermine our own desires and wants. We are the commodity by virtue of our consumption. The formula of how we interact with media, how we like and dislike, approve and disapprove, is the gold mine of capitalism. It allows us to be more manipulable and susceptible to what the market tells us we want—and with such infinite accuracy, who are we to protest?
of sharing content with friends; rather, the only social aspect of the experience is the fact that the content and information you are interfacing with is generated and filtered based on the engagement of other content consumers. The most intimate relationship being developed on TikTok is between the user and their recommendation mechanisms. However, to equate the lack of traditional “community,” or interpersonal engagement mediated through technology, on TikTok with the lack of salience in forming tastes and identity would be remiss. The app’s algorithm is so adept at noting preferences that modes of identification are developed and disseminated solely on TikTok. For impressionable youth, these modes of identification can come to precede identities developed organically offline.
TikTok’s powerful algorithm has created an invaluable receptacle of consumer data. Walmart and Microsoft are among a number of powerful companies that have been lining up to partner with TikTok and gain access to its consumer data. Both entities are seeking to leverage the data: Walmart for “commerce and advertising advantages,” and Microsoft for adding “fuel [to] its AI/big data work” (ZDNet, Mary Jo Foley). Shirking these more powerful partners, TikTok has instead partnered with Oracle, a software infrastructure company specializing in databases. In one pitch docket titled “Create Irresistible Customer Experiences with Oracle Infinity,” Oracle champions surveillance capabilities like that of TikTok: “It all starts with the ability to collect the behaviors of your customers.” Indeed, within “an oversaturated market,” ascertaining “the buying intent of prospects and customers so they can engage them with consistent, personalized content” is invaluable, and few apps have complied such a far-reaching and intimate repositories of young people’s consumption behaviors as TikTok. Paradigms of media consumption are analogous to paradigms of material consumption, and with the monetization of media consumption, the former is becoming as profitable as the latter. Baudrillard’s warning of the expanding simulacra necessitates that “reality” as a concept is fixed and unchanging: “A hyper-reality is increasingly simulated for people, constructed by powerful media and other cultural sources… people lose the ability to distinguish between the simulations and reality…” Is it, therefore, naive to criticize or analyze social media as an aspect of existence that is distinct from “reality” itself? Are our lives not already so mediated through the lens of the simulation that is media, exacerbated by the pandemicera shrinking of the “real world” through mandatory lockdowns and travel restrictions, minimizing our space and freedom, that reality and simulacra are indistinct?
Baudrillard highlights that within modes of simulation, “identities are constructed by the appropriation of images, and codes and models to determine how individuals perceive themselves and relate to other people.” Still, the algorithm precedes our communities just as media consumption precedes the social aspect of the app. Identities are constructed on the premise of consumption—a model analogous to the way that we consume material goods and that has implications for the extension of capitalism into our personal lives.
TikTok’s simulacra is weaponized as an avenue for further commodification and exploitation under capitalism. If commodity production is predicated on the devaluing of labor to create an extracted value, the simulacra is predicated on the devaluation and exploitation of the real to be distorted and overcome by simulation. In this sense, the simulation is the extension of commodification, and both demand consumption. This is epitomized in the monetization of “content creators” on TikTok, who receive funds from the company’s Creator Fund in addition to sponsorships with companies vying to have their products viewed by millions. TikTok’s influencers are not selling a product or service, however: they are selling their personalities and images as they are disseminated throughout the simulacra. A unique dual distortion of these influencers takes place, where their images are both distorted online through the simulacra and are commodified by capitalism.
towering shelves of books; playing Pokemon with my sister on our shared, pink Nintendo DS; and taking walks with my grandparents around Stow Lake. I still do seem to find the greatest joy in the smallest pockets of life. I love that first sip of coffee in the morning and the way the aroma seeps through the kitchen. An ideal Friday night for me looks like lighting a candle and having a meaningful conversation with a friend. And there’s still something so deliciously ambient about walking through the shelves of a library.
Coming to Berkeley, however, has made me somewhat guilty of those little pleasures. The morning coffee ritual is rushed as my mind buzzes with the checklist of work for the day ahead. My time in a library is spent at a desk, hunched over my laptop, as I grind an assignment out. As much as I try to set my own pace, to take time for those little joys, I still do feel the need to hustle squeeze in my chest and wring my throat. There Always heading towards a larger goal, toward the next shinier milestone.Theexperiences that I’ve had so far have made me rethink the life that I want for myself in the future, especially with regard to my career.
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The English major is not a flashy one. I don’t think any major, really, is flashy, but there are majors that can set you up for a flashier lifestyle in the future. The English major doesn’t come with a lot of prestige at Berkeley, nor does it provide as stable a financial outlook as other majors might. At first, I was insecure about pursuing English. There was a chapter of my college life where I put my effort towards applying to Haas instead, knowing that an acceptance would help me both financially and career stability-wise. That chapter ended with a rejection letter and a sigh of relief. Somehow, having that door
The SpectrumAmbition
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In retrospect, I think a large part of my insecurity came from comparison. A lot of my friends from freshman year had dreams that looked bigger than mine: going into Big Law, becoming a surgeon, or landing a software engineering job at a tech company with a six-figure salary. Compared to the fields of study that would land them there, studying English suddenly felt like wearing an oversized, frumpy dress--outdated and unattractive. Being surrounded by so many people whose goals were so different from mine, I felt a need to belong, and so I pushed myself to aim for a more societally attractive goal, goals that were arbitrarily “bigger.”
With that said, it may seem like I lack ambition. I used to subscribe to the same belief based on the preexisting definition of ambition in my head. While the formal definition of ambition is “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work,” I always negatively associated it with working relentlessly and sacrificing morals to achieve that end goal. I didn’t see or didn’t want to associate myself with that kind of definition of ambition.
But I don’t think reaching any of those goals would have brought me much fulfillment, nor would they have made me as happy as a quaint, slower life would. I don’t have my career prospects solidified yet, but I do know one thing: I want to live a life where I can focus on the things that matter most to me — not the things that matter to those around me. I want to live a life where I can continue to savor those small, quiet moments.
I want to put my efforts toward something that I feel strongly about, not something that brings in the biggest paycheck or would bring me the most prestige. Those are very respectable goals for some people, but they aren’t my goals.
A couple of weeks ago, however, I had a conversation with a friend that began to shift this perspective. The whole concept
The other form of ambition looks like typified Berkeley hustle culture. It looks like landing a spot in a competitive consulting club, hunting for summer internships, and taking on research opportunities left and right--all in hopes of getting a job into a highpaying or societally prestigious field like medicine or software engineering. These fields are the most popular at Berkeley. The 2020-2021 Undergraduate Major Headcount reveals that the most populous majors reflect what Silicon Valley deems attractive: L&S Computer Science comes first at 1,875 students, followed by Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) at 1,626.5 students and then Economics at 1,420 students. As stressful as it can be, especially given the popularity and competitive nature of those fields in the Bay Area, I don’t see this form of ambition as necessarily negative or detrimental. For those who truly feel strongly about a career in these fields, hustle is an expression of determination and diligence. There are also people who hustle for financial purposes, career stability, and upward mobility, which are respectable reasons as well. This culture is problematic when it becomes the only accepted or recognized form of ambition. There’s also something to be said about not being ambitious. There are people in my life that I simply wouldn’t characterize as ambitious. These people aren’t driven by the future — they like to live in the moment, to experience the present. Ambition, after all, implies a drive towards something that hasn’t been achieved yet. At Berkeley, someone in this category might appear to be lazy or slacking. However, there is also a value to being present in the moment, rather than being only futureoriented. There’s a perception that a person can “waste their talents” — that time, diligence, and intelligence can be better spent in one place rather than somewhere else, as if it’s some investment where the returns are meaningful only in salary and prestige. But I would suggest that these people are not “wasting” their time, rather, they’re maximizing it to their own definition.
There’s an assumption that a goal needs to be big for ambition to exist, but I’m not so sure that’s true anymore. Now, I like to think of ambition on a spectrum. There’s the form of ambition that I just talked about: the kind that exists no matter the size of the goal, big or small. As long as someone feels strongly and works hard to pursue their goal, I would define the person as ambitious.
So here comes the last question: Do I think that I’m an ambitiousHonestly,person?I’mnot so sure, but only because the image of my ideal future is still slightly vague. There are bits and pieces of it I do know, like spending time enjoying the little things, or using my writing to connect with people, but other areas look a little blurry. When I do find out what I truly want out of my future, maybe I’ll have a better answer. Until then, I won’t stress about my ambition or lack thereof, and I encourage you to do the same. Wherever we’re at, we could all probably stand to take a step back and evaluate our ambitions and passions — they might look a little different from the last time
86 spring 2021 / calibermag.org of ambition had already been brewing in my mind, but as we talked, sitting in that corner seat at Artis Coffee, two (delicious) lattes sweating between us, my outlook began to change. This friend expressed that one of her goals in life is to surround herself with a community of people who she feels comfortable with and who feel comfortable with each other. This is her goal, but it didn’t fit my definition of “ambition” at the time. And yet she told me that whenever someone asks her whether she sees herself as ambitious, she always responds with a “yes,” because she genuinely feels ambitious about making that goal a reality.
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The materials: What do I start with (if anything)? Like any good project, let’s start the materials. When we’re born, what do we start with that later gets shaped into a personality? Or even before that question: Is there anything to really build? Or are we born with it? We’ve all probably heard the saying “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” before. Well does it? We need to first consider if our personalities are innate or if they can really be shaped. Like most things, the answer is complicated. But boiled down to its core: it’s a bit of both nature and nurture. If we dig deep and consider things at the scientific level, the DNA that we inherit from how to craft a personality
And so I began to wonder: what is my personality? How much of my personality and preferences are based on what truly excites or intrigues me and how much of it is crafted for external consumption?
WORDS BY ISABELLE ZHOU | VISUALS BY MADDIE YEH
If my best friend has been loyal and trustworthy in the past, I have faith that they’ll stand by me in the future. And if a coworker has previously been late to our meeting, maybe now I’ll tell him to come at an earlier time. But other than these small gut feeling assumptions about each person, I am unable to even begin to describe every behavior or thought of another person, no matter how close I am to them. So how do we even begin to build something as complex as a personality?
Specifically, bright canary yellow, like the crayons children use to color the sun in their drawings and lavender purple, the pale, soft pastel that speckles the plant it’s named after.
94 spring 2021 / calibermag.org M y favorite colors are yellow and purple.
If my dad gave good advice when I was a child, I’ll continue to go to him for my problems as an adult.
The colors themselves are quite beautiful, but they’re also meaningful to me for what they represent: a bright, cheery enthusiasm coupled with a mature, serene disposition. They’re how I want others to see me. And at this point, I can’t differentiate whether these are my favorite colors because of their hues or because of the way they bolster the image I hope to portray to others.
Taking a step back, I’m not quite sure I even know what a personality is. A personality is vague; its formal definition considers the characteristics and patterns of thinking and behaving that shape the individual. Yet in that sense, I can’t even begin to find a formal definition for either myself or my close friends and family. To me, a personality is a general shape I’ve given someone, a confidence that they are a certain way and will continue being that way.
our parents should be able to influence the way we feel and behave at a genetic level. DNA encodes for the proteins we create, which in turn can affect our hormonal levels and overall bodily functions. So when we get hot-headed in arguments or don’t easily get emotional, that surely influences our personality.
The idea: Do I know what I’m making? Now that we know a personality is craft-able, there’s something I want to clear up early on. Just because something can be molded, doesn’t mean that it has been molded with intention. When we’re a baby, do we fuss and cry because we’ve decided we want to be a high-maintenance baby? Probably not. We probably do it just because that’s what we want to do. Later on, we might laugh and smile because we know that makes our parents happy. There is a difference between being intentional with what you’re making and making it. None of us knew from the start that we were shaping a personality. Maybe we had a preference and it made us happy to follow it. Maybe we did something good and others praised us, so we made sure to do it again. These are decisions we made with purpose, but that doesn’t mean we had an idea of what we were building from the However,start.that doesn’t mean we can’t refine what’s already there. Studies show that a personality is fluid
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But outside of temperament, a personality is highly influenceable by the environment. Past studies have even begun using artificial intelligence and machine learning to potentially predict personality traits based on behavioral data, showing that not everything depends just on genetics (Chittaranjan, 2013). In fact, behaviors aren’t the only things that change according to the environment, even our genes can change in due time. Epigenetics is the study of “how variation in inherited traits can originate through means other than variations in DNA” (National University, Shook). The epigenome are chemical tags that can wrap around our DNA and based on certain situations in the environment, they can react and activate particular genes. For example, children who are raised in abusive environments are more likely to activate impulsive or temperamental genes (Palumbo, 2019).
Psychologists differentiate this as temperament: the behavior traits that include sociability, activity level, attention level, and persistence. Scientists estimate that around 20-60% of temperament can be explained by genetics (Bratko, 2017). Studies have even tied specific genes to specific portions of our temperament. Some gene variants are linked to our thirst for adventure (DRD2, DRD4) while others keep us grounded and careful (KATNAL2). Some genes make us sociable and personable (PCDH15) while others might contribute to introversion (MAOA) (Abrahams, 2019).
So long story short, it looks like we start out with something: a temperament, a series of different traits that are directly correlated to our genes and that can make us more likely to behave in certain ways: everything from dare-devil tendencies to introversion. But everything else can be influenced. In fact, even our genes can be there is certainly something here to be crafted.
The refinement: How do I want to change my personality? And here’s where the crafting begins! We have our materials—a temperament and an existing personality— and we’re confident that we’re capable of changing them into something new. But now the problem is: to what? Like most artists, we look to references to start our creative process. From zodiac signs to scientific personality tests, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways that we have attempted to categorize personalities. But a personality is complex, so how do we find an accurate reference?
96 spring 2021 / calibermag.org and can be changed throughout your lifetime. We can always craft ours using intentional goal setting and sustained effort once we’re more cognizant of who we are and how we may differ from who we want to be (Psychology Today, Hardy).
Looking towards history Originated from ideas of divination and stellar spirituality, astrology is an age-old belief that the motion of the stars could define your identity and predict its future. Based on your birth date and time, each person was categorized into one of twelve star signs with specific dispositions and personalities. Leo is ambitious and captivating. A Virgo is a perfectionist. Cancers, like me, are supposed to be loyal and caring, yet overly-emotional. I’m not entirely sure how, but I fit that description to a tee; maybe the stars really do have some predictive power or maybe I was easily influenced by a description of what I was supposed to be.
Personality tests have been rising in popularity, not only for entertainment, but in our professional careers as well. Today, 1 in every 5 Fortune 1000 companies use the MBTI in their hiring process and The Big Five might be the best measurement of the three, but it’s probably the least ‘useful’ in the eyes of society. Looking towards…me? From astrology to MBTI to the Big Five, there’s obviously a lot of frameworks we can base our personality on. If you’re already to this point in the piece, I’m certain you’re at least somewhat interested in my take on personality tests and categories. What’s the point of these categories? And how can they help me better understand what I want in my personality?
The first utility of a personality is that of inclusion. We like to feel like we have a holistic understanding of the world around us. Personality types give us a sense of assurance, both for ourselves and for others. We are oftentimes unsure of ourselves. Have you ever been afraid of yourself? Not certain that you could be capable of something? Acting in a way that doesn’t feel like it fits in with who you are? Humans are innately contradictory. We can do things in erratic patterns and without rationale. A personality is an assurance, an easy label; it’s a way for us to know that we aren’t alone and that others are like us, that
Unlike astrology, our choice dictates our personality type. Based on how we view ourselves, or would like to view ourselves at least, we answer a series of questions that place us into one of the 16 types and give us a general outline of our beliefs, values, habits, and relationships. I, for example, am an ESFJ: the loyal, tenderhearted, and organized of the 16 personalities (hmm sounds pretty similar to the Cancer description…). My personality type is an accumulation of potential in-born traits, but also my people-pleasing tendencies. I’m cognizant of the choices I’ve made to frame my personality in this way, and do so because I believe it reflects well for me in the communities and interactions I have. To me, Myers Briggs types a framework that shows me how others might view different personalities. Why not make it easier for people to understand me by fitting myself to one of the 16?
Created by a mother-daughter pair in 1942, the test outlines 16 personalities created by measuring four pairs of opposing preferences: (1) extraversion or introversion, (2) sensing or intuition, (3) thinking or feeling, and (4) judging or perceiving. These tests are self-placement.
I’d argue that we craft our personality because it’s useful to us. Why do we put effort into changing anything? Because we think there’s some sort of benefit in the change, that the efforts we’ve placed will be converted into some sort of utility that we may reap at a later time.
Looking towards industry From Buzzfeed quizzes that tell us which Disney princess we are to more comprehensive personality quizzes backed by research and renowned psychologists, personality tests have been rising in popularity and authority within the most recent generation. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) may be the most popular of these tests.
“A personality is a way of... putting the agglomeration of all the different parts of a complex human being into an understandable short bit, of wrapping our arms “fully” around something that can’t be fully encompassed.”
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A personality is useful: we put our entire selves into words in order to communicate it to others, so they know how to react, so they know how to predict, and so there can be some mutual understanding.I’veframed a personality as a craft. Something that we build, often time with intention. Art’s utility lies in its aesthetic; the way it makes us feel. For other craftables like building, furniture, and products, its utility doesn’t need to be explained. Almost everything has its use. And thus, I’ve explained our personality down to its utility: to define and to predict. But maybe we should question: does our personality have to be useful in the first place?
There’s no certain answer to this question, but I find Wendy Brown’s perspective pretty satisfying. Brown, a prominent political economist of our time, argues that we have made ourselves into human capital. Much like other capital such as machinery or assets, we have invested in our ‘human capital’ in hopes of a greater return in the future. We now go to college, not to enrich our minds and perspectives, but to build our pedigree in hopes of getting a better job. We offer aid and support to countries in need not through the good of our hearts, but to boost our own economies. In our age of mass consumption, we have created many things for external consumption. Now, our personality is probably one of them. And in some sense, we’ve stripped our day-to-day relationships down to utility. But a personality is different from an identity. Or at least it can be. Not everything about yourself needs to be fully non-contradictory and fit into the same story. Not everything about yourself needs to be useful. When we focus too much on crafting that side for external consumption, we forget that not everything about ourselves needs to be made for others. So yes, I have definitely made something. And no, it is not what I started out with. But it’s not as if I’ve molded clay in a piece of pottery. That assumes I started with something rudimentary and made it into something better, more useful. A better analogy might be: giving a song a name. A name can’t encompass everything about a song. It can’t describe all the emotions we feel when listening to it or all the small intricacies that make the song unique. But it sure is useful for us in terms of picking out things in our genre, knowing the general gist of the song, or pointing it out to a friend.
The second utility of a personality is that of predictability. If we can fully understand a human being, we can be certain of who we’re sitting next to and have a good idea of what they might do next. We can anticipate their actions and react accordingly. But not just for actions. As a society, we value intention just as much, if not more, than the action itself. It’s not enough that they are nice to us, we need to know that they like us. But intentions are intangible; we can never know exactly what goes on in another person’s head. That’s why a personality, a rationale on what they might be thinking and why they might be thinking that way, is another assurance that we might be able to read their intentions well.
The reflection: What have I made? How different is it from what I started out with?
And if we are already wary of ourselves in one way or another, then we must be terrified of the people around us. How could we even begin to know others when we aren’t even privy to their true thoughts or intentions? We like to know that others are in a group to know that they are sane. That they too, are a part of our group.
Predictability is a core part of every personality category system. Whether it be as obvious as the direct promises of divination in astrology horoscopes, or the promise that they can predict an employee’s work habits just from their MBTI.. Our society sees personality as a risk-reducing asset. So my take is that when framing your personality, use whatever reference you want; they’re all worth considering because they all identify traits that we might want in ourselves. The greatest utility is for our personality to be familiar, so others can recognize that we are like them, and consistent, so others can predict what we might do next.
With a great amount of effort and references in mind, we might have successfully crafted the personality that we wanted. But what have we really crafted? Going back to our starting question: what really is a personality?Inmyopinion, a personality is a way of framing an identity. It’s a way of putting the agglomeration of all the different parts of a complex human being into an understandable short bit, of wrapping our arms “fully” around something that can’t be fully encompassed.
99spring 2021 / calibermag.org we are sane and can be safe in our own skin.
Spectacle of Hope Within the Movie Musical WORDS
The BY HAFSAH ABBASI VISUALS BY CHARLENE WANG
I watched Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort for the first time two years ago at a local drivein theater, having grown up with Singin’ in the Rain. Demy’s film, starring real life-sisters Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac, centers on two restless young twins, Delphine and Solange. In what is an ode to classic
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ou know there’s a hollowness in your city when all the homes slant the same — all tan, twenty-five feet high, Spanish-influenced. There are approximately 45,000 people living in my suburban town, but it feels simultaneously like both less and more than that. Sometimes it even feels like that number isn’t real, because community can’t be seen, much less felt. All we have are our isolated little boxes, where maybe you have everything advertisements and institutions and America tell you you’ll need, but you’re still left with an unexplained malaise and yearning. When I was young I used to feel this was distinct to Carmel Valley, my hometown. But as a teenager, I realized that this isolating quality I felt in my childhood of relative privilege, ironically, was quite common—actually, so common that one could build collectives of Americans in communities who felt the same way. I realized years ago that to be an introvert growing up in the American suburbs is to deal with a malaise, loneliness and yearning that seemed unchanging, chronic even. Yearning for what? I had wondered. Intimacy? Connection? Being understood? But what did that look like, tangibly? Classic Hollywood cinema showed me one rendering of connection through the form of the musical romance. One film I loved growing up was Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain. The film offers a lighthearted fantasy of 1920s Hollywood amid the industry transition from silent films to talkies. At the heart of the film’s joyful ethos is a dreamy romance taking place between ingénue Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) and leading silent movie star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) as Lockwood, his best friend Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), and Selden race against the clock to make their next film at Monumental Pictures into a talkie after the success of the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. Singin’ in the Rain fully indulged in the romance and fantasy of Hollywood with vivid colorful sets, intricate choreography and music, and wind machines making the glittering stars stand out. The lush colors at once endeared us to Kelly, O’Connor, and Reynolds, creating an adoration in the audience that bordered on the parasocial, while also idealizing them to such heights that rendered them faultless, inaccessible, and perfect, even. The film’s lack of interest in cynicism and its pure interest in the fruits of one’s dreams and the joy of connection—both romantic and otherwise—made it a film I returned to again and again. But what I found after watching the film countless times was not necessarily something tangible, but in fact that it was impossible after watching it to not to believe in a certain kind of hope. The sheer joy and uproarious exuberance of Donald O’Connor’s comedic musical number “Make ‘Em Laugh,” where O’Connor experimented with physical comedy — running into walls and contorting his body into odd shapes — reminded me that one is never too old to channel their inner child. Matched by the darker lyrics that alluded to the commodification of celebrities by film studios, the song also displayed the importance of using a comic lens to cope with the dark and tragic often embedded in our environments. Later in the film, Gene Kelly’s performance of the title song, in which he whimsically steps to the beat of the lyrics on the rainy streets of Los Angeles, echoes a similarI’msentiment:laughing at clouds so dark above. The sun’s in my heart and I’m ready for love.
Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place. Come on with the rain, I’ve a smile on my face. Kelly reminds us that a true sense of hope can only come from the knowledge of despair. So when I say that after growing up with Singin’ in the Rain, it was impossible not to believe in a kind of hope, I don’t mean the kind of hope that one can earn something in particular: a prize, an achievement, or even a romantic relationship, really. What I found was the hope of possibility: a self-reflexive sort of idea that it was vital to dream of and hope for something distant — something that was perhaps even unreachable— in the face of disquieting malaise.
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Jacques Demy’s film, on the surface, may seem overly concerned with the end goal of romance as Delphine, Solange, and the other residents of Rochefort sing about their desire for romance and adventure, but its deferral of any definitive ending for either of its leads emphasizes liminality over resolution, and the power of hope and possibility as a continual process. In experiencing Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort, I realized that I didn’t need to yearn for anything in particular. That in fact, doing so would only prove to be emotionally fruitless. The power of yearning lies in the uncertainty of what its fulfillment may look like—in that such a feeling can be expressed alone and collectively, through song, dance, and eye contact, through silence and writing.
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Even though The Young Girls of Rochefort was released in the 1960s, Delphine and Solange’s unyielding yearning for adventure, romance, and connection, particularly amid the sleepiness of their small seaside town, feels remarkably contemporary. The film’s paradoxically romantic yet cynical rendering of possibility is particularly resonant, especially as the film is aware of the power of fantasy, particularly among working-class sensibilities. For one, while the film is an ode to movies like Singin’ in the Rain, unlike such fantasies it also grounds its characters in their working-class realities. This in itself diverges from the typical romantic fantasy that is conceived as free from structural or economic burdens in its boundless hope. The Young Girls of Rochefort has one foot in the tangible — in the dampening effects of capitalism — and in boundless possibilities of fantasy and romance. It conceives of song and dance as both a real, material thing done for money, with Delphine being a dance instructor and Solange a music instructor, while song and dance also acts as an expression of fantasy, dreaming, and possibility, as the twins express their hopes and dreams through music: Delphine is intent on meeting her secret admirer, whom, unbeknownst to her, is Maxence, a poet and painter she repeatedly misses meeting as he lounges in her mother’s café, while Solange aspires to become a musical composer. The film at once plays with the musical as a form— its heightened fantasy and indulging of hopes, wants, and dreams — while refusing to give its characters definitive endings, romantic or otherwise. Solange does kiss and dance with Andy Miller (Gene Kelly) near the end of the film, but the sequence is constructed as dream-like, with little dialogue, blurring the lines between the imagined and the dreamt, and the real and the tangible. Delphine unknowingly boards a train that the man of her dreams, Maxence, has boarded, but the film does not depict them meeting, instead emphasizing how connections so often remain just out of grasp. Ironically, Solange does not pursue romance, and she experiences it colorfully. Delphine does, yet she ends the film yearning rather than being rewarded for her romantic optimism as the typical romantic comedy heroine is. The film is beguiling as a result, as it dashes the vivid, colorful fantasy it so artfully constructs.
In his 1962 novel Another Country, James Baldwin wrote: “So what can we really do for each other except — just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope—for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are? Don’t you think so?” The Young Girls of Rochefort is an embodiment of Baldwin’s plea. Individual possibility and growth is entrenched in our relationships with our community, no matter how sleepy or loud, suburban or crowded. There is an infinite number of possibilities on the horizon — of adventure, of love — that is ubiquitous and ever-present around us. All we have to do is become comfortable with the discomfort — of the uncertainty of where hope can take us.
The film marries the palpable fantasy of the Hollywood musical with a youthful yearning characteristic of the contemporaneous sensibilities of the French New Wave. Delphine and Solange are met by differing possibilities of love, with Solange presumably finding love with a foreigner, played by Gene Kelly in a nod to his sparkling onscreen persona as a romantic lead and singing and dancing tour de force, while Delphine is met throughout the film by a dashed romantic hope as she continually misses the man of her dreams.
Hollywood confections like Singin’ in the Rain, Delphine and Solange burst into song on the streets in one elaborate song and dance sequence after another as they dream of leaving their scrappy seaside town in southern France.
So, what went wrong with #girl boss? How could a term that was so glamorized and preached by young wom en become entrenched with such a nega tive connotation?First,scholars and feminist journal ists began to scrutizine the term, arguing that it was more misogynistic than fem inist. In particular, Magdalena Zawisza, a consumer and gender psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in the United Kingdom, argued that is an example of female“Haveinfantilization.weever heard about ‘boy bosses?’” Zawisza said. She argued that “girlboss” is not an empowering term as it emphasizes a woman’s femininity and “infantilises” a woman’s role as a boss (BBC, Anderson).
“Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”, the name of a song by Gunt, is a phrase that many are familiar with, as the alliterative ex pression quickly turned into a meme on socialBut,media.what does girlboss really mean?
Girlboss: WORDS BY RINA ROSSI
The term girlboss has changed dra matically since its inception in the early 2010s, switching from having a very pos itive connotation to an extremely nega tive connotation. Specifically, the term “girlboss” was popularized by Sophia Amoruso, the ex-CEO of the women’s retail store Nasty Gal. Amoruso, a young woman who hitchhiked around the West Coast, initially started Nasty Gal at 22 years old in 2006, in order to make ends meet. Interestingly, she started this, as a small online business, out of her bed room, selling vintage clothes on eBay. Her online store rapidly became wildly successful, which led her to start a Nasty Gal store. The store was nationally ac
Successful Young woman or ‘sexist Trojan horse’?
A
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And what implications does this popular term have on the lives of women today?
Similarly, journalist Vicky Spratt called the term “girlboss” a “sexist Tro jan horse” in a Refinery29 article. Specif ically, Spratt argued that while the term seems to empower women at first by making space for them at work, but in ac tuality, fails to give women agency. Like Zawisza, Spratt said that the term “di rectly infantilises” women in the work
claimed and grew to be one of the lead ing fashion stores. In fact, Amoruso was valued at around $280 million by Forbes. In light of all this success, Amoruso penned an autobiography in 2014 called #Girlboss, which became a New York Times bestseller. In the book, Amoruso talks about her upbringing, personal life, Nasty Gal and the road to becoming an entrepreneur—including the ups and downs of being a female CEO (Observer, Cao). Consequently, “girlboss” refers to a woman “whose success is defined in op position to the masculine business world in which she swims upstream” (Salon, Spencer). Amoruso would also create Girlboss Media in 2017, which was a company that hosted conferences, podcasts and wrote blogs with a “female-empowerment” goal (Observer, Cao). Mandy Lee, a Tik Toker who creates fashion videos under the username @oldloserinbrooklyn, ex plained how she graduated the same year that #Girlboss came out and observed that the concept of the “girlboss” was popularly praised and embraced by many young women around her, including her self. Specifically, Lee said that “the ab solute gorilla grip girlbossing and hustle culture had on my age group was astro nomical.” Clearly, the term “girlboss,” during its inception, was extraordinarily popular and influential for young women.
nyone who is familiar with Sophia Amoruso and her former brand Nasty Gal, has frequented the internet in the last few years, or downloaded the app TikTok, has heard of the term “girlboss.”
Clearly, the term “girlboss” has lost its adoration. On social media sites like TikTok and Instagram, the term is still popular with the hashtag collecting over 3 billion views on Tiktok. Yet, the phrase is used in a satirical manner and is often used to describe failed or fraudulent fe male leaders like Elizabeth Holmes, who deceived the public into believing that her health technology company, Thera nos, could run multiple blood tests just through a single finger prick. Thus, it is here that comical phrases like “Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” became popular on social media to describe failed feminists while satirizing the phrase “live, laugh, love.”In light of the controversy surround ing these former girlbosses’ demises, a light must still be cast on the potential misogynistic and workaholic implica
107spring 2021 / calibermag.org place and argued that the word “girlboss” would not be necessary if our society was not as patriarchal as it is (Refinery29). In addition to the criticism the term received from scholars, many began to signal to the “fall” of girlboss. Nasty Gal came under fire in 2015 for firing preg nant employees (Business and Human Rights Centre, McNeal, Zarrell). In 2016, Amoruso filed for Nasty Gal’s bankrupt cy and also stepped down as CEO of the Girlboss multimedia brand on June 22, 2020 (Fast Company, Dishman). While Amoruso, the ultimate “girlboss,” had stepped down, she was far from the only “girlboss” to do so in June 2020. In fact, there was a wave of popular “girlbosses” who also resigned, one by one, that same month (Insider, Hoffower). Specifically, many popular female CEOs who were formerly perceived as “girlbosses” began to resign from their positions upon allegations of leading a racist or toxic workplace in June 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests (The Atlantic, Mull). In an Insider ar ticle entitled “The fall of the girlboss is actually a good thing,” journalist Hillary Hoffower pointed out that between June 8 and June 12, many “girlbosses” re signed from their positions for allegedly leading toxic and inequitable workplaces. In particular, Refinery 29 co-founder and editor-in-chief Christine Barberich, Man Repeller founder Leandra Medine, Ban. Do co-founder and Chief Creative Offi cer Jen Gotch, The Wing co-founder and CEO Audrey Gelman and Reformation founder & CEO Yael Aflalo, all stepped down or resigned. Aflalo, the former CEO of Refor mation, a women’s clothing store which aims to “bring sustainable clothing to everyone,” was criticized by former Ref ormation workers of color, who said that working for the company “traumatized” them and that it was the most racist place they had ever worked. One for mer employee of color noted that while Aflalo mistreated and often ignored her, she complimented white employees on their looks (Today, Lowe). Aflalo issued apology statements on social media con demning her past behavior and donated money to racial equity funds, but these actions were not well-received by for mer employees who made the allegations against her. Ultimately, on July 12, Afla lo resigned as the CEO of Reformation (WWD, Moore). Around the same time, Man Repel ler co-founder and editor-in-chief Le andra Medine-Cohen was under fire for her poor treatment of black workers and lack of workplace diversity. Specifically, the controversy started when Man Re peller, a women-centered website which encouraged women to stop dressing for the male-gaze, published an article writ ten by Medine-Cohen entitled “Where We Go From Here: A Message for the MR Community,” on June 1, 2020 at the height of the George Floyd protests. Medine-Cohen’s statement read that Man Repeller would “not remain silent in the face of police brutality and white su premacy” and would work towards fight ing systemic racism. This article was met with great controversy, as readers pointed out that her company had “longstanding” issues with diversity and inclusion. Simi lar to Aflalo, Medine-Cohen attempted to remedy the situation by releasing more statements reaffirming her stance on an ti-blackness, diversity and inclusion, but readers and commenters on social media were still upset at her actions. By October 2020, Man Repeller rebranded itself to be named “Repeller,” but shut down in that same month due to financial difficulties (Fashionista, Colón). As if the situation with Man Re peller and Medine-Cohen was not bad enough, the former CEO garnered even more criticism after appearing on De signer Recho Omondi’s podcast in July 2021, where many accused Medine-Co hen of using anti-Semitic language and failing to understand her privilege. Spe cifically, she noted that she always felt oppressed by classmates in high school, as she was one of “immigrants’ kids” since Medine-Cohen’s parents, who are jewelry corporation owners and jewelry designers respectively, immigrated to the United States from the Middle East. De spite this, she still noted that she “bene fited from her perceived whiteness.” Ad ditionally, Medine-Cohen noted that she always felt “homeless” in high school, even though she attended the elite Upper East Side Ramaz School, which costs up wards of $42,000 a year. Consequently, New York Maga zine’s, “The Cut,” published the infamous article “Upper East Sider Realizes She’s Privileged,” detailing Medine-Cohen’s interview. This story gained immense popularity from the moment it was pub lished, with some social media users and TikTokers like Lee joking that the article seemed satirical. Lee as well as other so cial media users and journalists pointed out that girlbosses inherently were not empowering, as they generally described female workers and leaders who were “traditionally privileged, wealthy, col lege-educated and white” whose work environments were toxic and rooted in systemic racism, which described both the identities and actions of Medine-Co hen, Aflalo and other former girlbosses.
108 spring 2021 / calibermag.org tions of this term.
Carolyn Rodz, CEO of Market Mentor, reported that women in top positions at companies often feel that they constant ly need to work harder than men in or der to prove themselves in the workplace (Rodz, Fortune). While constant hustling is something that some women may be able to commit to, constant work and taking on large workloads can lead to unhealthy consequences, like burnout (Moss, Harvard Business Review). Thus, should “constant trailblazing” be some thing that society should be reinforcing to young women and girls?
Additionally, the term “girlboss” completely excludes non-binary individ uals from being praised for being power ful leaders who also fight against gender stereotypes in the workplace. Terms like “girlboss” are similar to popular phrases like “pick-me girl”, which are used to describe a woman who begs for approval from men while bringing other women down (Affinity, Llyod-Dickinson). While internalized misogyny is an important so cietal issue that all genders must work to eradicate, it is important to recognize that the term “pick-me” only describes prob lematic women, rather than men. Similar to “girlboss,” there isn’t a distinct term which describes a man who uplifts him self by bringing down other men. Work place toxicity and racism, as well as in ternalized sexism, aren’t only issues that are unique to female CEOs. “Girlboss” also glorifies the vil ification of women while overlook ing similar ills that men in positions of power have committed. While those like Barberich, Medine, Gotch, Gelman and Aflalo should never be praised for their leadership or businesses, as they were clearly founded on systemic classicism, anti-blackness and toxicity, the popular ity of the term “girlboss” as a negative word does present misogynistic under tones, as it demonstrates a societal fas cination with demonizing women, yet never holding male CEOs accountable for similar actions. After all, as Zawisza said, there is no term for a male boss— he is just a boss; “girlboss” is clearly a gendered term that reinforces a male gaze into women in the working world (The Guardian,BecauseMahdawi).ofthis male gaze, it is no surprise that fraudulent “girlbosses” like Elizabeth Holmes garnered so much legal and public attention in her infamous Ther anos case, in comparison to ills that male CEOs have committed. For instance, there have been numerous accusations of privacy violations, price gouging, mis leading advertising and harassment at Uber and genocide incited on Facebook in Myanmar. Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, never faced legal consequences as large as those of Holmes, and certainly none that were as sensationalized as the ongo ing Theranos scandal. Serious issues like those at Face book and Uber were allegedly prevalent at Tesla as well. Specifically, a Tesla em ployee reported that the plant is a “pred ator zone” for women (The Guardian, Levin). Similar reports of discrimination, such as allegations of anti-blackness and the presence of swastika drawings in the Tesla bathrooms were reported in a 2018 New York Times article. However, it only took Tesla reporting to The New York Times that there was no “pattern of discrimination and harassment” at the company for such reports to be dismissed (Hepler). There also has not been any legal action resulting in consequences taken against the company for alleged ha
Specifically, Cho Adolfo, a UC Berkeley undergraduate student noted that “girlboss” reinforces constant hustle and bustle culture.
rassment issues. Despite previous brush es with the law, Kalanick, Zuckerberg and Musk are still able to continue as the praised leaders they are today, without the general public distrusting them and their companies as a whole. After all, no one can make satirical jokes about these men’s unethical behavior being a prod uct of “girlbossing,” because that term simply doesn’t apply to them—no term dedicated to male CEOs really exists, and the male gaze primarily prioritizes vilify ing women, not men. Thus, while it is important to hold female CEOs like Eliz abeth Holmes, who engaged in, encour aged and aided in undoubtedly unethical behavior accountable, it is sexist to over look the similarly unethical behavior that is carried out by male CEOs’.
Instead of only calling out the un ethical women in business, we should focus on implementing better workplace inclusion policies and holding all toxic CEOs accountable for their actions. The overlooked claims of anti-blackness, rac ism, anti-semitism and sexism at compa nies like Tesla need to be addressed bet ter, by taking action agaisnt executives who allowed such discriminatory be havior to occur. 54 percent of women at U.S. companies report that they are “very ambitious” according to a CNBC survey, while 75% of black women note that they are “very ambitious,” yet only two black women were named to the 2021 Fortune 500 list (Dunn, Abc News). This signals that a lack of ambition isn’t what is keeping women out of top positions at companies, but rather unwelcoming, discriminatory and toxic work environ ments are(Connley). Hopefully, as more men in power are held accountable for their actions, and greater efforts are taken to dismantle structural inequality in soci ety, conversations will ensue surrounding what identities and characteristics make up a “boss,” in turn bringing more wom en of color and people from underrepre sented backgrounds to top positions.
“(Girlboss is) definitely seen as a gender inclusive term but can be prob lematic if we hold ourselves to the stan dard of constantly trailblazing,” Adolfo said. As of June 2021, Women only make up 8 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and just 1.2 percent of them are women of color (Dunn, Abc News).
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112 spring 2021 / calibermag.org Caliber Magazine Issue 21 | Fall & Spring 2021